Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) scoffed on Tuesday at a comparison made between Twitter potentially charging users a monthly fee and leading legacy media outlets that ask readers to pay for news.
“Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet on Monday in reference to billionaire Elon Musk.
David Sacks, a West Coast-based venture capitalist, replied to the Democratic congresswoman’s tweet and asked “Why aren’t [The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic] free? Their billionaire owners should stop being greedy and give us those products for free.”
Ocasio-Cortez disagreed with the comparison.
“Are you seriously equating an app where people are torrenting racial slurs at an accelerated clip with the New York Times,” she wrote back to Sacks. “Also fyi, legacy newspapers actually care about verifying newsworthy sources. And they don’t charge their journalists/creators for ‘priority’ placement.”
Musk, who last week took over the social media platform, has floated the idea of charging users $8 a month, similar to a subscription service, in order to become verified with the platform’s blue check mark.
Musk’s proposed plans for Twitter’s business model and content moderation policies have drawn concern from experts who track misinformation and hate speech in politics.
The billionaire tech mogul drew widespread backlash just days after his acquisition of Twitter when he tweeted, and then deleted, a link to a conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband Paul Pelosi at the couples San Francisco home last week.
The Times reported this week that it had added 180,000 digital subscribers during the third quarter of 2022.