The College Fix

Were they asleep the last four years?

Progressive students at Arizona State University are concerned about President Trump’s relationships with “some of the wealthiest tech CEOs in the country,” including Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and, of course, Elon Musk.

Those like Gem Wolf-Schwaiger, a member of the Young Democrats at ASU who studies human communication and political science, worry the president’s “close” relationship with Musk, et. al. will result in social media being controlled by those who are in it “for themselves and for power,” The State Press reports.

Wolf-Schwaiger said tech giants “have vested interests in exploiting others” and will do away with the “self-managing” of social media feeds.

“There’s a balance between making sure that people can say what they want, but, on top of that, you need to ensure that harassment and degradation of vulnerable groups of people doesn’t happen,” Wolf-Schwaiger said.

Adora Chen, also of the Young Democrats at ASU, claimed Trump is “less scared” of showing the “explicit nature” of his association with the tech CEOs.

MORE: NSF paid universities to develop AI censorship tools for social media: House report

The College Republicans at ASU’s Afonso Machado also had “concerns” about Elon Musk’s participation in the new administration, but overall wasn’t too worried:

“We’ve seen a lot of controversy in terms of social media platforms, especially getting involved with the election, promoting certain candidates over others, or censoring certain people for certain opinions,” Machado said. However, he added that seeing a “tech guru” like Musk in office has him somewhat “on the fence.” …

“I don’t believe that he’s going to pass legislation, or work with the CEOs to silence people, but rather empower them to be able to state their opinions, and then have some sort of new methods of fact-checking misinformation,” Machado said. …

“The people of the United States should not fear that they’re going to be banned or removed from social media platforms for stating their opinions,” Machado said. “What he (Trump) wants to do is prevent exactly what happened to himself from happening to everyone else.”

Wolf-Schwaiger and Chen either must have forgotten how conservatives were censored by Big Tech under the last administration (regarding COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop to name two … and don’t forget Trump being banned from Twitter), or agreed with it under the justification of “content moderation” and/or “dis/misinformation.”

Given the date of the State Press article, however, the Young Democrats get some slack for not knowing that news outlets such as Politico, the New York Times and others were the recipients of U.S. taxpayer dollars for years.

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IMAGE: Donald Trump News/X

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