December 06, 2022
In case you missed last week’s news. CEPR Co-founder and Senior Economist Dean Baker had his Twitter account, @DeanBaker13, “permanently suspended” only to have it reinstated a short time later. While it may have been due to a technical issue, Dean’s temporary suspension follows the removal of other Twitter accounts in recent days that have criticized the company’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk. As this December 1 article from the New Republic explains, Dean’s suspension is part of a troubling trend on Twitter.
Those who follow Dean’s work know he has written for years about the problems associated with media concentration, most recently in this Beat the Press post from earlier this week. Dean has long called for reforms such as the removal of Section 230 protections for social media platforms (including Twitter) that either sell advertising or personal information. As Dean explained, the removal of those protections “means that the big platforms could be held liable for defamatory material that they circulated over their platform.”
CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot highlighted Dean’s proposals and criticisms of Twitter in a recent column for Inside Sources that was published in dozens of other newspapers throughout the US.
OK, so Dean may have tweeted this:
Was THAT what got him temporarily banned from Twitter? We’ll probably never know, but it just goes to show that Dean, Mark, and all of us here at CEPR have these guys running scared. Please consider donating to CEPR today so that we can continue to shine the light on how the concentration of the media in the hands of a few billionaires harms our economy, not to mention our democracy.
