Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, recently threw the social media world into a frenzy by spending about 1% of his billions on Twitter stock. He is now the biggest single shareholder of the company, and now sits on Twitter's board. Liberty-minded folks, aware that Musk is skeptical of social media's leftist-censorious ways, were pleased by the move. The self-appointed arbiters of truth, gatekeepers of information, and declarers of correctness... not so much.
Musk will succeed in opening up Twitter to free speech, after which a false flag operation of epic proportions will flood that platform with truly vile and hateful incitements to violence - probably from both sides, testing his resolve. Twitter employees will say "see? we told you so" as a result. How this progresses from there, we will see. But Twitter has marginalized itself as a platform already - only 2% of the population even uses it regularly - so I can hardly see the risk in taking the chance to restore freedom of speech to the platform. Probably Musk foresees all this, he's not stupid. The bigger question is how the other social media platforms will respond and what all that bodes for us regular people - the "products" of these platforms. What I'd really like to see? The radical progressives retreat to "their" platforms - like leftwing talk radio did(!) or MSNBC - with their tiny, marginalized viewership. Then the rest of us can enjoy the public square without propaganda ministers controlling our every word.
There are encouraging signs. The growing schism between liberal and leftist is manifesting. I often cite Bari Weiss and her FAIR project as one example. There's a report of a book coming out about how Pelosi's furious with and "over" the lefties. Substack told the disgruntled Twitterites "don't come here."
There'll never be a "clean" or "pure" conclusion to all this - it's just too jumbled a world, and there's a gray area between policing the inciters, warmongers, etc and straying into partisanship. But, I trust market forces more than I trust government intercessions in this (well, in just about all) instance.
Love that substack tweet! Was not expecting that last sentence, ha!
It *was* really delicious.
Musk will succeed in opening up Twitter to free speech, after which a false flag operation of epic proportions will flood that platform with truly vile and hateful incitements to violence - probably from both sides, testing his resolve. Twitter employees will say "see? we told you so" as a result. How this progresses from there, we will see. But Twitter has marginalized itself as a platform already - only 2% of the population even uses it regularly - so I can hardly see the risk in taking the chance to restore freedom of speech to the platform. Probably Musk foresees all this, he's not stupid. The bigger question is how the other social media platforms will respond and what all that bodes for us regular people - the "products" of these platforms. What I'd really like to see? The radical progressives retreat to "their" platforms - like leftwing talk radio did(!) or MSNBC - with their tiny, marginalized viewership. Then the rest of us can enjoy the public square without propaganda ministers controlling our every word.
There are encouraging signs. The growing schism between liberal and leftist is manifesting. I often cite Bari Weiss and her FAIR project as one example. There's a report of a book coming out about how Pelosi's furious with and "over" the lefties. Substack told the disgruntled Twitterites "don't come here."
There'll never be a "clean" or "pure" conclusion to all this - it's just too jumbled a world, and there's a gray area between policing the inciters, warmongers, etc and straying into partisanship. But, I trust market forces more than I trust government intercessions in this (well, in just about all) instance.