Many of the media attacks lobbed at the social media platform X are motivated by gatekeepers in the media who want control of the flow of information, according to tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro.
Musk appeared with Shapiro at the European Jewish Association (EJA) conference in Krakow, Poland, on Monday. Musk and Shapiro discussed topics such as anti-Semitism, free speech, and social media during a roughly hour-long discussion. The conference itself, scheduled to take place from Sunday to Tuesday, focused on the spread of anti-Semitism since Hamas’ invasion of Israel on October 7, the deadliest day for Jews since World War II.
During a discussion on media stories targeting Musk and his social media platform X, Musk and Shapiro agreed that X has become a massive work-around to information censors who manage traditional media outlets.
“The legacy media for most of my life, up until the past 15 years, performed what they saw as a gatekeeping function. They were the ones who got to define the narrative. They were the ones who got to determine what was appropriate news and what was inappropriate news,” Shapiro said.
“After social media arose, in the early days, the sort of things that you articulate were actually articulated by virtually all the social media heads. [Meta founder] Mark Zuckerberg used to say the kinds of things that you say. [Twitter co-founder] Jack Dorsey used to say the kinds of things that you said,” he continued.
The Daily Wire host said that the social media companies were taken over by “legacy media types” who reverted the platforms back to a gatekeeping function instead of allowing news to spread organically.
“Then there seemed to be an institutional takeover by a lot of legacy media types in terms of the kinds of rules and restrictions that were placed on what you could and could not say on these platforms,” Shapiro said. “Who would get banned, who would not get banned. Advertisers weaponize against, you know, particular outlets if those outlets didn’t follow the dictates that were put forward by these types.”
“And it seems like since you took over, one of the biggest objections of all is that they’re not performing the gatekeeping function anymore. Someone else is,” Shapiro said.
Musk agreed.
“I don’t think there should be a gatekeeping function by a small number of individuals. For newspapers in America, there are about five editors that decide what gets put on the front page or what to focus on or what not to focus on. And most of the other papers just copy them, essentially. But is that really what we want? Do we want just a handful of people deciding what they think is important, or should it be that the people decide what’s important?” Musk asked.
“I think it should be a sort of an organic thing where the people decide what’s important and what to focus on, not just a handful of editors. And yeah, they don’t like the fact that this power has been taken away from them, but I think it should be,” he added.