Woke Inc. author Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t mince words about the impact the world’s richest man had in giving shareholders a voice to fight the censors at Twitter.
The Strive Asset Management executive chairman joined the Sept. 14 edition of Fox News’s America’s Newsroom and said that even if Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter doesn’t go through, his bid opened new ground for Americans to fight back against Big Tech censorship.
“He has paved the way for shareholders exercising their voice in the boardrooms of these companies,” Ramswamy told Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer.
“Most of the owners of these public companies, including Twitter, are the everyday citizens of this country through other funds managed by [left-wing hedge funds] BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard that together, historically, have exercised the vote.”
Ramaswamy analyzed that Musk’s actions emphasized the power that individual shareholders could wield if they take initiative to stand up against Big Tech controlling the flow of speech:
I think a lot of everyday citizens can now say, ‘You know what, it’s my money invested in these companies. I can actually tell these companies myself as a shareholder that I want to see them represent free speech principles rather than censorship principles.
The tumultuous saga between Twitter and Musk reached a new boiling point when whistleblower and former Twitter executive Peiter Zatko exposed how Twitter was “lying” about the number of spam bots to Musk. In addition, Zatko argued that Twitter's leadership “misled its own board and government regulators about its security vulnerabilities, including some that could allegedly open the door to foreign spying or manipulation, hacking and disinformation campaigns,” according to CNN’s summarization.
Some of the “deficiencies” documented in the complaint included, “Ignorance and misuse of vast internal data sets,” “Mishandling Personally Identifiable Information,” and “Misrepresentations to the [Federal Trade Commission] on these matters.”
Fox News co-anchor Dana Perino later questioned Ramaswamy on how his view of shareholder power applied to the Communist Chinese Party (CCP)-tied TikTok, which has made it a point to silence speech that opposes leftist narratives on topics such as abortion and transgenderism.
“[TikTok is] just an instrument of this broader Chinese, mercantilist strategy of capitalism, of using companies to basically pollute the minds of the United States and its citizenry, but not actually allowing that same type of content to be propagated in China,” Ramsawamy said of the “Trojan Horse” app.
However, said Ramaswamy, the vehicle of change that will shake up Silicon Valley will take the form of the citizenry setting the “boundaries:”
[I]f you’re going to go beyond the role of what a company was supposed to do — taking directions from the governments, be it the U.S. government as these social media companies have started to do or the Chinese government which is I think is an interesting trend that’s been under-discussed — then at the end of the day it’s going to be up to the role of citizens to hold those companies accountable.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
