From Murdoch to Musk: Social media ownership and the political economy of platform content governance

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Abstract

The recent controversies about content governance at X and Meta have something in common: both were initiated by the platform’s controlling shareholders. As hyperrich tech oligarchs tighten their grip on industry and politics, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg represent a newly active ideological force in the governance of the digital public sphere: social media ownership. Yet platform scholarship has until now had little to say on the questions of ownership influence. To bridge this gap, this article draws on media ownership research and the study of media moguls to ask: who owns the major social media companies, and how do these owners influence content governance outcomes? To map platform ownership, I examine public records including SEC disclosures to distinguish individually-controlled oligarchic firms from diversely-held market-owned firms. Meta and X’s ownership structures are shown to be distinctly oligarchic, compared to other major platform firms such as Bytedance, Apple, and Microsoft, and, to a lesser extent, Google, Reddit and Bluesky. For governance outcomes, I review insider accounts of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg pursuing self-interested political instrumentalism through their platforms’ content policies. Under this oligarchic private logic, content policies at X and Meta appear to be diverging from industry-standard market logics, as well as from the professional logics of Trust and Safety management. To assess the full extent of this oligarchic divergence, I call for a programme of sustained comparative inquiry. I also identify pathways for reform inspired by media law, including ownership transparency and reforms to Trust and Safety management structures.

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