Like millions of people around the world, I have been closely following the debacle at Twitter since Elon Musk took the company over. Not only do I fear the loss of a space for free debate and access to information – especially valuable for those of us from not-so-free places. But as a political cartoonist, I am also afraid of losing the platform where I and many of my peers started our activism during the Arab Spring, which made Twitter what it is today.Perhaps this turn of events was inevitable. For a while now, the tech industry has been cultivating personality cults. It started with Steve Jobs and his carefully constructed image of an open, curious innovator who in reality presided over “one of the tightest-controlled corporations” in the world. While Jobs stayed away from politics, the tech bros that have come after him, pursuing iconic status, have not.Their fervent quests to grow their fortunes and their egos have pushed them onto the political scene and exposed their self-serving agendas. Musk made his political intentions for the Twitter takeover quite apparent, tweeting in May – while the deal was still not concluded – a painting of Louis XIV, the “Sun King”. A self-declared “free-speech absolutist”, he crowned himself the new “enlightened” king of social media and declared that he will set Twitter “free”.
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