The best New Statesman long reads of 2022
The stories and essays that had you (and us) gripped from start to finish this year.
ByElon Musk
Elon Musk is a businessman, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of Twitter, and has been estimated to be the world’s richest man. He was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, and after studying at University of Pennsylvania embarked on a career as an entrepreneur, co-founding Zip2, a software company that was bought for $300m in 1999.
Twitter’s double standards under Elon Musk
The New Statesman has uncovered evidence that right-wing accounts are being treated differently.
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Key policy moments of 2022
Policymakers and experts on their policy highlight – or lowlight – of the year.
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How 2022 killed the myth of the tech genius
This year saw the great humbling of the Silicon Valley billionaire – from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg.
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Elon Musk burned billions of dollars just to find out people hate him
When Musk bought Twitter he bought himself the gift of insight, and realised how little he wanted it.
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Elon Musk’s journalist ban will invite politicians to intervene
Silencing the free press crosses a line.
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Sam Bankman-Fried exposes the moral conceit of effective altruism
For tech CEOs, the suckers of the present come second to people of the technocratic future.
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Labour: Social media bosses should be held criminally liable for harmful content
The party has called for the scope of the Online Safety Bill to be expanded as it returns to parliament.
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Elon Musk’s Kanye West problem
If you give awful people the ability to say anything they like, you can’t be surprised when they say something…
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Margrethe Vestager: “Twitter must ensure what is illegal offline is illegal online”
The EU commissioner warns that Elon Musk could be on the wrong side of her crusade against Big Tech’s dominance.
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Is Elon Musk too rich to fail?
Twitter is $13bn in debt and losing revenue, but for the world’s richest man even failure can have an upside.
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Inside the Twittering machine
Will Elon Musk turn Twitter from a dysfunctional social media platform into a new kind of digital dystopia?
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Donald Trump is back on Twitter. Let freedom reign
Every day Elon Musk dismantles the site free speech gets a bit worse for the activists who really need it.
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Will Twitter collapse this weekend?
Staff are worried. Users are in panic. The platform may not last much longer.
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The chaos at Elon Musk’s Twitter is a parable of US power in the age of Big Tech
Silicon Valley’s plight is fundamental to one of the biggest geopolitical questions of the 21st century: can the US maintain…
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Bruce Daisley’s Diary: Twitter’s death spiral, the Qatar trap, and why watching Matt Hancock in the jungle is no fun
ELon Musk has lost $100bn in 2022, and would shed an additional $44bn with the demise of Twitter.
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Elon Musk took his new toy apart trying to figure out how it worked
Twitter’s wiring is being ripped out in real time, and the prospects for putting it back together are shrinking.
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Elon Musk’s useful philosopher
Silicon Valley billionaires have taken up the ideas of William MacAskill, the leading voice of longtermism. But they will not…
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Is this the end of Twitter?
Elon Musk knows the only thing that would kill Twitter is another, better platform. Fortunately, I have just invented one.
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Elon Musk’s Twitter is the tech version of Liz Truss’s premiership
The chaos at Twitter has eerie echoes of recent political upheaval.
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