In a recent interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter, said he was “shocked” after discovering that the United States government had “full access” to private communications within the social media platform.
Not surprising to some, this claim by the owner of Starlink and Tesla Co., raises an alarm about the ever-growing power of governments in manifesting the anticipated China-style surveillance society that’s giving the globalist elites more advantages in imposing oppressive policies which include shameless censorship, fake health emergencies, and forced vaccination.
The news broke out from an excerpt of Carlson’s Fox News interview with Musk. According to Elon Musk:
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on Twitter blew my mind. I was not aware of that.”
When asked by Carlson if that includes people’s private messages, Elon Musk immediately replied “yes”. He also told Carlson that he was very surprised upon learning that this is widespread and that government agencies went too far for being able to monitor people’s social media account. This will likely to worry people, especially those who assumed that their conversations were totally private and protected by social media companies like Twitter.
As what I have said above, this is not a surprise to some people. Since the social media has become widely used, it has also become an important source of information for US government and its intelligence departments. This includes the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and various federal agencies that conduct investigations, screen travelers, identify threats, and other kinds of information gathering. As Freedom House, a non-profit organization working to protect and advance human rights and democracy, wrote in 2019:
“Governments are increasingly purchasing sophisticated technology to monitor their citizens’ behavior on social media. Once the preserve of the world’s foremost intelligence agencies, this form of mass surveillance has made its way to a range of countries, from major authoritarian powers to smaller or poorer states that nevertheless hope to track dissidents and persecuted minorities. The booming commercial market for social media surveillance has lowered the cost of entry not only for the security services of dictatorships, but also for national and local law enforcement agencies in democracies, where it is being used with little oversight or accountability. Coupled with an alarming rise in the number of countries where social media users have been arrested for their legitimate online activities, the growing employment of social media surveillance threatens to squeeze the space for civic activism on digital platforms.”
References:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/social-media-surveillance-us-government
