Will Elon Musk follow the old adage that media freedom is only for those who own the media?

There's a famous saying among those who discuss freedom of the press that's so familiar it was quoted to me by several people I interviewed about Elon Musk's move to take over Twitter.

The maxim, now embedded in media lore, is sometimes attributed to a quip by U.S. journalist and humourist H.L. Mencken whose writings in the first half of the 20th-century referred to media moguls of his own time. 

"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one," goes a version of the quote, which in another one of its variants is credited to journalist A.J. Liebling.

Whoever coined it, the point of the quotation is that far from the model in which democracy is upheld by widely distributed local newspapers — once owned by opponents of the governing elite, like Canadian radical William Lyon Mackenzie — the free press and its later incarnations, radio and TV, have mostly fallen into the hands of the rich and powerful.

Musk's move to take control of Twitter, which has yet to be finalized, has reignited controversy over the power that wealthy people have in influencing the democratic process through ownership of these global platforms.

The Tesla and SpaceX mogul is already the world's richest person — and he's helping to redefine the famous maxim about ownership and press freedom, but this time in the era of globalized social media. 

Even among those who push for greater democratic control of media, the effect of Musk's sway over such an influential platform as Twitter is widely disputed.

Some, like the American Civil Liberties Union, say the mogul's influence may be benign or even positive. But others interviewed suggested the combination of Musk's libertarian "frat boy" ethics and his Midas Touch for making money could make the divisive social media business model even more toxic.

"The idea of the extraordinarily rich, typically men, owning key media outlets has a very long history in Canada and internationally," said James Turk, director of Canada's Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University. 

In the early 1900s, Lord Beaverbrook, a.k.a. Max Aitken, parlayed a Canadian business career into ownership of the newspaper with the world's highest circulation, the Daily Express, and used his paper to spread his conservative views to the working class.

Turk points to the Thomson family, which still controls the Globe and Mail, as well as the Siftons, and many others, including Conrad Black, who founded the National Post. Internationally, there's Rupert Murdoch who bought the Wall Street Journal and who created Fox News, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post to mention just a few.

"They do it for a variety of reasons," Turk said. "They want to influence the public discourse, they have their own views of the world."

The influence of those who own social media giants is different from those who own print newspapers at least partly because of algorithms, the embedded software that decides what you see — a form of control not always obvious to people using Twitter, Facebook and their many competitors, Turk said.

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