Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan is bent on holding Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk, accountable—and the right-wing outrage machine isn’t having it.
The FTC has been investigating Twitter’s security policies, the Washington Post (3/9/23) reported, “following an explosive whistleblower complaint accusing the company of violating a 2011 settlement that required it implement privacy safeguards.” The probe has expanded, the Post explained, since Musk’s takeover last year,
as former employees warned that broad staff departures of key employees could leave the company unable to comply with the agreements it made with the FTC to protect data privacy.
The New York Post (3/8/23) charged that “Big Brother” was going after Elon Musk for “dar[ing to] expose the federal government’s lies on Covid and its collusion with tech giants on Russiagate and Hunter’s laptop.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/8/23) called Khan “unrestrained.”
The New York Post editorial board (3/8/23) invoked George Orwell as it explained that in addition to “digging into Twitter’s layoffs,” the FTC is “also demanding all internal communications by, from or about Musk.”
Republicans see Khan’s probe as politically motivated against Musk, an outspoken right-wing partisan on issues like trans rights (Newsweek, 12/12/22) and labor unions (NPR, 3/3/22). Musk threw his support behind the Republicans in the most recent midterm elections (Politico, 11/7/22).
Intensified obsession
This marks an intensification of the right’s obsession with Khan. Robert Bork, Jr. (son of the Supreme Court nominee) called for Congress to investigate her (Wall Street Journal, 3/2/23). As Bloomberg (3/2/23) reported, the US Chamber of Commerce, tech companies and Koch-backed groups have attacked her antitrust campaigns. It said:
Since 2021, Khan has been mentioned in 43 editorials, op-eds and letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal. Jonathan Kanter, who heads the US Department of Justice’s antitrust efforts, appears in five. Khan’s critics have gotten personal at times, and some people say it’s impossible to ignore their sexist tone. “There is no doubt that Chair Khan is being subjected to what’s really a disproportionate level of critique that is not based in the substance. It’s really based in personal attacks on her gender, her race, age and then also the fact she is trying to use an agency’s authority to enforce the law, which has not been done for a generation,” says Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, which supports strong antitrust action.
Christine Wilson wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/14/23) saying she was resigning from as an FTC commissioner because Lina Khan hadn’t recused herself from a decision involving Meta after criticizing Meta’s acquisitions as a private citizen. But Wilson didn’t have any problem voting in favor of a Bristol-Myers Squibb acquisition after she worked on antitrust issues for the drug company as a private lawyer (Legal Dive, 2/15/23).
In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal (2/14/23) announcing her resignation, the FTC’s last Republican commissioner, Christine Wilson, painted Khan as a bull in a china shop, acting with “disregard for the rule of law and due process.” CNBC (2/14/23) reported:
Khan’s approach has come with risk, as most recently evidenced by the FTC’s failure in court to block Meta’s proposed acquisition of VR fitness app developer Within Unlimited. But those who support Khan tend to argue that if regulators win all their cases, they’re likely not bringing enough of them.
Wilson criticized the fact that Khan had not recused herself from an administrative proceeding on the Meta/Within deal based on her statements before joining the agency advocating for keeping the company from making future acquisitions. Wilson also admonished the two other commissioners, who supported her decision. The FTC ended up dropping the administrative proceeding anyway after failing to win a preliminary injunction in federal court.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/6/23) also ridiculed Khan for losing the case.
Mark Zuckerberg, chair and co-founder of Meta (formerly Facebook), has been a Republican punching bag for some while (AP, 8/8/21; New York Post, 10/13/21; Independent, 8/26/22). But the right presented Khan’s legal action against his company’s growth as overreach. The conservative National Taxpayers Union (2/1/23) called the FTC’s loss in the Meta case “a victory for innovators and startups.”
A mess to clean up
The right enjoys using Elon Musk’s Twitter to censor its foes (Intercept, 12/16/22) the way it pretends the left was able to do under the old regime.
Khan’s probe into Twitter has brought the vitriol to a new level, as the right paints Musk as their man on the inside of Big Tech, fighting perceived internet censorship of conservatives (Fox News, 12/19/22). As a result, while conservatives have railed against social media companies at election time, actual government action against Twitter is no longer welcome.
Progressives like Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (CNBC, 3/8/19) and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (Politico, 7/16/19) have long sought to break up Big Tech, so left and right agree, at least rhetorically, that Big Tech and social media companies have too much unchecked power. Khan, from her record, is acting on that sentiment.
There’s good reason for a serious regulator to see Twitter as needing supervision to ensure customers’ rights are being respected, and that one of the world’s richest humans has not amassed too much power. Here is just a taste of the mess Musk has caused:
- The departure of top security staff and roll outs of new policies under Musk has meant that Twitter is “exposing itself to a deluge of new security risks that could soon ramify into the public sphere, according to top cyber experts and those who’ve overseen cybersecurity at other companies” (Politico, 11/11/22).
- “The European Union told Elon Musk to hire more human moderators and factcheckers to review posts on Twitter” (Reuters, 3/7/23).
- Musk’s Twitter has censored journalists and left-wing activists (Intercept, 12/16/22; Independent, 1/29/23).
- Twitter “complied with an Indian government request to delete all links to a BBC documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to journalists and free speech advocates in the country” (Hollywood Reporter, 1/24/23).
- Musk was forced to publicly apologize after he publicly mocked a disabled worker (AP, 3/7/23).
- Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida) asked Musk “how he plans to combat the rise of antisemitism on the social media platform” after Moskowitz said his “Twitter account received ‘hundreds of hateful, divisive comments’ after he posted a video clip of himself pointing out the spread of antisemitism on the platform” (The Hill, 2/10/23).
- Twitter has allegedly failed to make rent payments (Wall Street Journal, 1/23/23).
- Janitors at the company headquarters went on strike because “Twitter reportedly failed to negotiate new contracts with Flagship, the company responsible for hiring the janitors” (Gizmodo, 12/6/22), which, in addition to being an anti-labor practice, has meant unsanitary conditions (New York Post, 12/30/22).
Trying to ‘harass business’
The right pretends to be opposed to Big Tech—but leaps to the defense of Facebook and Google when anyone tries to regulate them (Fox News, 1/30/23).
Republicans and the Rupert Murdoch empire want to portray themselves as defending Musk and Twitter against some kind of partisan inquisition, but the fact is that the right has always opposed Khan for her aggressiveness against corporate giants—whether Big Tech, anti–Big Tech or just big.
For example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/8/23) railed against her campaign to curb noncompete clauses, a position the paper saw as support for organized labor. The paper (7/5/21) also accused her of simply trying to “harass business.” Walmart, a notoriously anti-union company, accused Khan’s FTC of “agency overreach” (Fox News, 8/31/22).
While Fox News (1/30/23) complained generally about the Biden administration’s overzealous antitrust action against Google and Meta, it took special aim at Khan, saying she wrote “a law school paper complaining about Amazon’s prices being too low.”
What her Yale Law Journal article (1/17) actually said, according to the New York Times (9/7/18), was that Amazon “should not get a pass on anticompetitive behavior just because it makes customers happy.” And since “monopoly laws have been marginalized…Amazon is amassing structural power that lets it exert increasing control over many parts of the economy.”
Fox also complained that Khan “lauded a far-left organization that…calls for universal basic income.” This policy actually exists in Republican-voting Alaska, and is discussed approvingly in the University of Pennsylvania business journal Knowledge at Wharton (5/10/18).
Murdoch and GOP sympathy for Musk is about corporate ownership class solidarity against Khan, whose mission riles the One Percent. This only makes Khan’s work on Twitter and so many other corporate giants seem all the more necessary.
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