With billionaire Elon Musk weighing into UK politics, Jeremy Corbyn made a critical point about super-rich ownership of our media. And it went viral:
Billionaires should not own social media platforms.
Billionaires should not run our newspapers.
Billionaires should not control our politics.
A free media is a democratic media – a public good that is owned and run by us all.
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) January 6, 2025
Not only does Elon Musk own X (formerly Twitter), but fellow billionaire Mark Zuckerberg (worth £167bn) has a controlling stake in Meta. That’s of course the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads. These websites are the digital infrastructure that facilitate everybody’s communication, expression and even act as marketplaces.
It makes no sense for a billionaire to control such infrastructure, just as it makes no sense for billionaires to control the roads that everyone with a car drives on, or the water everyone drinks or the energy everyone uses. But of course, in the UK, rich shareholders do and Tony Blair’s thinktank has even recommended the charging of rent on our roads.
“Mechanisms for people to participate” in social media organisation
James Muldoon is author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech. In Jacobin, he writes:
Platforms like Google and Facebook are public utilities that are fast becoming essential for living in our hyper-connected societies. We need a fundamental reorientation of the ownership and governance structures of platforms, so they are run for the people and not for profit.
Muldoon argues that we should approach the issue differently to prescribing more government regulation. He continues:
The greater the power and public role of certain digital platforms, the greater the need not simply to regulate them as public utilities, but to bring the service they offer back under public ownership and democratic control. We need to build open and inclusive platforms and provide mechanisms for people to participate in them and decide on how they are organised.
Shareholder models necessitate the extraction of as much monetary value as possible from the infrastructure. Muldoon points out that this can lead to owners fostering misinformation and a lack of privacy; exactly what Elon Musk is currently doing. That’s in order to “maximise the amount of time individuals spend on the platform”.
Of course, what’s most concerning is that individual, corporate control of social media can lead to the throttling of posts that are politically sensitive. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch called out Meta for what it calls “systematic censorship” of content related to Palestinians on Facebook and Instagram. This includes the banning of activists from Instagram, who had up to six million followers.
Elon Musk: the game should be up
That said, the government could also censor content, which is why Muldoon argues we need to move “beyond nationalisation”. He continues:
Calls for the democratization of the platform economy need not involve an overly centralized model of twentieth-century state socialism. There are a number of current publicly owned utilities, such as Scottish Water, that are operated by independent statutory organisations that are nevertheless accountable to the public through the government.
We can also turn to new forms of democratic and public ownership that could be dispersed across the local, regional, national, and international levels.
Featured image via TED – YouTube and Vice News – YouTube
