When analyzing the market space inhabited by both traditional and new-age media companies one of the necessary prerequisites for customer buy-in is Trust. Without trust, people can not consume a media source especially when that media source purports to be a purveyor of news and information.
According to Gallup, American trust in mass media institutions has tanked. Trust is down across all political demographics with the Democrats being the sole exception; this is an industry ripe for disruption. Enter Twitter and Elon Musk.
Twitter, at its core, is offering Trust as a Service (TaaS) to its user base. Twitter is trying to sell its audience on the idea that we can entrust it to host important conversations on its platform without engaging in unethical moderation tactics to censor information deemed ‘inappropriate.’ In addition, Twitter is attempting to prove to what extent it can act as a “trust broker” since conversations that happen on Twitter can make or break trust in people, institutions, and other entities.
Historically, we had what is now a ‘Legacy Media’ that brokered trust by telling us who we could and could not trust. As Malcolm X noted, centralized trust brokerage oligarchies gave a small group of people the ability to control the narrative to such an extent that perceptions of guilt and innocence could be shaped. Now we have reached a point, as shown earlier by Gallup, where Legacy Media has destroyed its own reputation by failing to adapt to the increasing levels of transparency that came with the Internet and through biased reporting.
Anything in a traditional media format is delayed, less scrutinized, and riddled with bias as indicated by the above chart.
1. After learning that Twitter employs at least 15 former FBI agents, I searched Facebook. What I found is alarming
— Name Redacted (@NameRedacted247) December 19, 2022
Facebook currently employs at least 115 people, in high-ranking positions, that formerly worked at FBI/CIA/NSA/DHS:
17 CIA
37 FBI
23 NSA
38 DHS
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