Musk’s Twitter changes could fuel tyranny

Mr Elon Musk announced the “Rate limit exceeded” policy on Twitter.  This means that you’ve reached the limit for the number of tweets you’re allowed to view per day.

In essence, it implies that you’ve been locked out of Twitter for the remainder of the day. I was personally unable even to read my own tweets once I passed my limits.

Mr Musk announced that verified accounts, which cost $8 (about Shs29,000) a month, are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. Unverified or free accounts will be limited to 600 posts and new unverified accounts to 300 per day.

Hours after his original declaration, in his signature taunting manner, he revealed that those limits would soon increase to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified.

Two hours after this update, Musk clarified that the rates would increase to 10,000 verified, 1,000 unverified, and 500 tweets for new unverified accounts.

The immediate frustration of most Twitter users was the move for slowing down Twitter and denying them freedom of expression.

In his defence, Mr Musk stated that hundreds of organisations were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”.

He had often complained about artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, proprietors of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.

On this, I think Mr Musk has no moral right to complain about exactly the same thing that Twitter did and does to make money. All these giant tech companies which call their customers “users” in fact “use/abuse?” customer data to run their businesses.

Therefore, his complaint was of a thief accusing fellow thieves of stealing his loot.

So, what is the political-economic implication of this teetering corporate tyranny of capitalists like Musk?

What does it mean to have Musk arbitrarily make changes to Twitter and disrupt millions of users’ activity, without any restraint?

The implication is far more serious than what normal conversations about people’s frustration with Twitter today are about.

This isn’t about Mr Musk running his business as he wants. Rather, it is about individual capitalists acquiring massive power over ordinary people, and using that power heedlessly to do as they wish.

American corporations like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, etc., are so rich and powerful that their wealth doubles so many sovereign countries’ GDP several times over.

This in effect makes their CEOs and board of directors have more reach and grasp than even powerful presidents of some countries.

However, we must remember that the goods and services many of these corporations control are private, not public, yet they are so intertwined in human life that they would pass for public goods and services.

The internet and key social media Apps count among such goods. Is it tenable to surrender that much authority to the whims of a weirdo like Musk? Or any individual billionaire? I think No.

Imagine the level of bureaucracy that all world governments put in place to control how much power democratically elected leaders wield… all of it is absent in the running of these trillion-dollar corporations! That should scare us, and we should have a conversation on how to mitigate it.

Mr  Musk is one of the few tech gurus who are dystopic about Artificial Intelligence. With the way he runs Twitter, I begin to think that he fears in AI exactly what he despises in himself… a wanton tyranny of a sick mind in charge of the affairs of man.

Unfortunately, most of us African elites are obsessed about totally the least important concerns.

We should all be woken by the overreach of multinational capital and individuals like Musk who pose the gravest danger to the future of our countries.

President Museveni or whoever succeeds him will always be attacked for corruption and dictatorship yet they will all always be mere mascots of foreign capital which call the actual shots in running our affairs.

It’s easier for us to be mad at Mabaati thieves because they are politicians, yet the case of Ham v DTB is a serious whistleblower reminding us that foreign banks and international lenders are laundering money and evading taxes bigger than the taxes we collect from all formally regulated banks through their illegal trading of financial institutions business in Uganda.

These things don’t seem to concern us, yet they are the explanations for our struggling economy and weak statehood.

The West has made us think that odious corruption and thievery by corporations is “free market capitalism”- i.e., legal business. Instead, they encourage us to hate our governments and leaders.

They’ve made us hate and blame ourselves first before we blame or even think about them.

 This is the key business in which our “Civil Society Organisations”, which actually are West policy agenda implementers, are involved in it. We should have woken up yesterday.

Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi,

Lawyer and Bar Course student at Law Development Centre.