--- We all know about Twitter acquirer Elon Musk, who bent the platform to fit his political worldview. But he’s not alone. Here’s Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella,

--- We all know about Twitter acquirer Elon Musk, who bent the platform to fit his political worldview. But he’s not alone. Here’s Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, owner of LinkedIn, who contributed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund. Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, who said that he feels optimistic about the new administration’s agenda. And here’s Larry Ellison, who will control TikTok in the US, who was a major investor in Trump, and who one advisor called, in a WIRED interview, the shadow President of the United States. Social media is very quickly becoming aligned with a state that in itself is becoming increasingly authoritarian. --- This was the real why. When control amasses to the few we end up in a place where there is a dissonance between what we perceive to be true and what is actually true. The voice of the dictator will say one thing but the people's lived experience will say something else. I don't think mastodon or Bluesky or even Jack Dorsey's new project Bitchat solves any of this. It goes much deeper. It is ideological. It is values driven. The outcome is ultimately decided by the motives of the people who start it or run it. I just don't think any western driven values can be the basis of a new platform because a large majority of the world are not from the west. For better or worse, you have the platforms of the west. They are US centric and they will dominate. Anything grassroots and fundamentally opposed to that will not come from the west. It must come authentically from those who need it.