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The world’s technology giants continue to have excessive influence on what the public gets to see, read and hear.
Coined by The Economist in 2018, “techlash” took off as shorthand for that sudden lurch in public opinion from “Tech is great!” to “…but BIG tech is terrible!”
By year’s end, it was the Financial Times’ word of the year. But it seems Silicon Valley oligarchs have been reading up on their Machiavelli and decided that if journalists won’t love them, they’ll have to be taught to fear them.
This past week on Elon Musk’s Twitter we saw the next step, with suspensions handed out to nine largely tech reporters from old media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, new media like Mashable, The Intercept and Business Insider, and citizen journalists like @ElonJet — which publicly records Musk’s flight paths. When the journalists took to Twitter Spaces to question Musk directly, he promptly left the chat. Twitter then closed down the entire service.
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About the Author
Media Correspondent
Christopher Warren is an Australian journalist and writer. He was federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance until April 2015, and is a past president of the International Federation of Journalists.
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