America loves a winner, and Elon Musk and Big Tech are the only real contenders left

Arnold Schwarzenegger recently put out a video in which he exhorted Americans to get behind President-elect Joe Biden. He asserted that Trump had been the worst President ever, a sentiment which it’s not hard to find support for around the world. It’s especially easy to find now, given that conservatives are being driven off social media platforms in droves. Because, even if stories of the culling of conservative social media accounts are exaggerated - and it’s hard to know how to measure such a thing - there’s no question that after President Trump’s de-platforming from Twitter, a widespread perception has arisen amongst conservatives that they have only to speak up and they will be gone from the internet. President Bolsonaro in Brazil has urged his Twitter followers in Brazil to switch platforms to Telegram, and significant numbers have already done so. Angela Merkel has also spoken out against Twitter’s muzzling of Trump. She, Donald Trump and Bolsonaro all have something in common – they are all duly elected heads of state and they are all alarmed by the immense power and reach of social media. So, is there anyone of any real significance in the world who isn’t? There might be just one. And interestingly, his exact political stripe remains unclear. Is Elon Musk a conservative? After all, he’s a man who markets flamethrowers, has his own tequila brand, and is in the forefront of industrial-scale efforts to tackle global warming. That doesn’t sound overly conservative under any standard definition. He’s also arguably the only major figure in the Western world able to speak completely freely on twitter without fear or favour. “A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” he tweeted earlier this week. Earlier, he’d urged followers to switch from messaging app Whatsapp to more secure rival Signal. Whether Musk’s exhortations will actually make any difference to behaviour or practice in the long run is hard to know. But if it takes being the world’s richest man to be able to talk without inhibition on social media, eventually the world’s electorates are going to get the message. After all, as one commentator said earlier this week, what happens if someone of a different political persuasion succeeds Jack Dorsey at Twitter? And so the shockwaves of the post-Trump internet revolution are likely to echo down though time, and across the markets. Section 230? - not too long for this world in the grand scheme of things, both domestically in the US and globally. The world’s lawmakers don’t like being told what they and can’t say. And they don’t much like being upstaged by a tequila manufacturer with a penchant for Japanese cartoons either. Just like Standard Oil got broken up at the beginning of the twentieth century, the same fate is now inevitable for Big Tech. It’s only a matter of time. Meanwhile, watch as Elon Musk, who’s censoring no-one, corners the market in electric vehicles and creates his own monopoly on the sly – with the bona fide excuse that he’s saving the world as he does so.