FTC Going After Musk Over Twitter

The Federal Trade Commission. It has been reported without much fanfare that the FTC is sticking their nose into the Twitter purchase by Musk. Of concern is the radical head of the agency.

The Federal Trade Commission could be unfairly biased against Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter due to its chairwoman’s previous employment at a left-wing group, according to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Jordan asked FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan to provide extensive details of her interactions with her former employer, the Open Markets Institute, and say whether she or the FTC have had any interactions with the agency regarding an April 26 statement from OMI Director Barry Lynn advocating federal intervention regarding the Twitter takeover bid. More

We heard a lot about the agency during the Obama administration.  So while it is easy to shrug off this story as nothing since it appears to be obvious that there cannot be anything that they can sink their teeth into….well not so fast. At the least they can tie up the Twitter purchase by months if not longer. After all, don’t we want at least to get passed November 2022? Better, block it and tie it up in litigation for years even when everyone knows the FTC will lose in the end. We have seen this play before.

Front Page Mag:

So why is the FTC even considering an antitrust review of Twitter? The answer is obvious: the FTC is part of today’s political establishment, which is dominated by Leftists who don’t believe in the freedom of speech and are trying to destroy it in the name of stamping out “hate speech” and disinformation. The FTC today is full of people who believe that Old Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board is a grand idea, and that their friends, colleagues, and allies ought to have the power to silence anyone who says things they believe are false, hateful, or damaging in whatever way.

Also part of this establishment is the Open Markets Institute, which claims to “address threats to our democracy, individual liberties, and our national security from today’s unprecedented levels of corporate concentration and monopoly power.” Yet instead of fighting against the social media giants’ monopoly of Leftist speech restrictions, OMI Director Barry Lynn is going after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

Lynn stated, “The Open Markets Institute believes the deal poses a number of immediate and direct threats to American democracy and free speech. Open Markets also believes the deal violates existing law, and that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have ample authority to block it.”

This is a rancid pile of hooey, and Lynn likely knows that. The FTC may well block the deal, but if it does, it will be because the establishment determines that such a block would be the most effective way it can deal with the problem Musk presents, not because it actually has the authority to do so or because there is any actual justification for not allowing the deal to go through.

Even worse is Lynn’s claim that Musk’s purchase of Twitter “poses a number of immediate and direct threats to American democracy and free speech.” This is straight-up Orwellian “War Is Peace” territory. Twitter right now is a far-Left propaganda platform on which saying that a man can’t be a woman (although that has relaxed somewhat since news of Musk’s acquisition) and that there was chicanery involved in the 2020 presidential election can get you banned.

Innumerable people who have spoken out in various ways against the Left’s fantasies and delusions have been banned; others remain but are heavily shadowbanned, which means that they might as well be gone, as hardly anyone ever sees what they say aside from a few people of like mind.

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Let’s take a look at this flashback:

We are picking up where Obama left off and it isn’t taking any eight years to get there.

FTC to “reinvent” journalism

June 3, 2010 — bunkerville

Mark Lloyd is a former associate general counsel and Chief Diversity Officer at the Federal Communications Commission of the United States from 2009-2012.

This is not a document meant to salvage an independent press.  It’s a road map for government control over the news.

The nation needs a strong, independent press, the FTC argues, and so they want to find ways for government to “reinvent” journalism.  If that sounds vaguely Orwellian to you, the actual language in the Federal Trade Commission’s discussion-points memo should have hairs standing on the backs of necks across the nation.  It shows a wildly laughable rationale for government intervention that would prop up the failing newspaper model in a manner that would put the entire industry at the mercy of the federal bureaucracy it’s supposed to keep in check.

Not only that, it then offers a very strange definition of “subsidy” in order to provide cover for a government intervention:

There are reasons for concern that experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial journalism. History in the United States shows that readers of the news have never paid anywhere close to the full cost of providing the news. Rather, journalism always has been subsidized to a large extent by, for example, the federal government, political parties, or advertising.

Mark Tapscott warns that a government reinvention of journalism will mean a journalism much less likely to be independent:

[W]hat they cannot deny is what is clearly written in the FTC document and what it reveals about the intention behind the initiative, which is to transform the news industry from an information product collected by private individuals and entrepreneurs as a service to private buyers, to a government-regulated public utility providing a “public good,” as defined and regulated by government.

The authors hide this dangerous intention behind carefully worded expressions of concern for preserving “quality journalism” and “addressing emerging gaps in reporting,” and they rationalize their proposed approach of massive government intervention in the news process as simply an extension of what government has always done via postal subsidies, tax breaks, and so forth. …

Better to explain yet again that the original intention of the Founders with respect to the media – “Congress shall make no law respecting … the freedom of the press” – is the key to saving independent journalism.

Then we must remind them that the adversarial relationship that is supposed to exist between journalists and public officials must apply no matter who those public officials might be or what political party or ideological school of thought they represent.

Elected officials’ first thought is always about re-election, while career government workers’ is job security. A journalist’s first thought is supposed to be getting the facts.

To that end, we’re supposed to be adversaries, not co-conspirators, partners, favored “stakeholders,” or beneficiaries. That’s why the Constitution made us independent.

Best of the swamp today.