The 'digital town square'? What does it mean when billionaires own the online spaces where we gather?

By Jean Burgess, Professor and Associate Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Queensland University of Technology

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, seems set to purchase the social media platform Twitter for around US$44 billion. He says he’s not doing it to make money (which is good, because Twitter has rarely turned a profit), but rather because, among other things, he believes in free speech.

Twitter might seem an odd place to make a stand for free speech. The service has around…

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