A few weeks ago, I carried out a somewhat pointless experiment with this blog. If I didn’t publicise it via social media, how many people would actually knew it existed? That statement in itself needs qualification because in the grand scheme of things hardly anyone knows it exists, just the odd 100 million or so who check in on a good day. Actually, I’ve just checked the stats and it turns out the word ‘million’ should have been omitted from the previous sentence. Without Facebook, my experiment revealed, almost no one read it. Eclectic Blue would die a death if I went on that way. To date, I am able to share this blog via social media but will this always be the case?
The American platform Substack, basically a blog with bells and whistles, has run into trouble with twitter. New owner Elon Musk considers Substack a rival to twitter and has banned folk sharing their Substack pages on his platform. It’s a matter for debate as to whether it is in competition with twitter, but here’s the thing. Substack is surely about free speech, with people able to express their opinions via Cyberspace and one of the ways of gaining extra traction is to share content via other providers.
Now, I keep hearing that we have a free press. And in terms of being free from government control, that’s true. But it is not free for anyone else barring, in the main, the illiberal elite. Your average Joe and Josephine has no access to the press beyond reading it. None of them would publish any of my work, probably because it’s shit but also because my mainstream left leanings are not appropriate for Fleet Street. So far, I can still share this blog on Facebook and twitter, but if I ever moved to Substack, Musk would not allow me to share my work on his twitter.
However, if you are an anonymous fascist troll, twitter welcomes you. That’s the weirdest part. People who use Substack under their own names are barred from using twitter, but if you’re a run of the mill neo Nazi, why don’t you set up dozens of fake accounts and Musk won’t bother you at all.
I am not entirely stupid. I know that my work is of little interest to people I know, never mind those I don’t. But mass media is a closed shop, where the rich and powerful call the shots and tell us what we can read. Elon Musk is doing his little bit to make it even harder for the little guy and gal to get heard. This is free speech, but not as we know it.
