Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

[grarpamp]

https://www.infowars.com/posts/elon-musks-declaration-of-war-against-the-globalist-empire-will-unleash-the-establishment-cancel-machine/

https://babylonbee.com/news/twitter-headquarters-suffers-severe-water-damage-from-liberal-employees-tears
I haven’t seen libs meltdown this hard since we told them they
couldn’t talk to five year olds about sex


"Content moderation" has become a euphemism for censorship.


@ggreenwald
Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they
were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not
only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it. Even if
Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.


https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1514995790313402373
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1514941630972899339
It's not about hate speech, either. They've baked their ideology into
the hateful conduct policy so that good-faith disagreement about
what's true and right constitutes hate speech—even if it's lawful,
well-intentioned, and eminently reasonable.
Replying to @ggreenwald
Censorship of conservatives gets most attention because it's so
common, but censorship of anti-establishment leftists is also
frequent: any dissident can be banned. Pretending this is about bots
or spam is fraudulent. This censorship is about control of political
information.


https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1514745371569922059
The Babylon Bee's @SethDillon gives his thoughts on @elonmusk's
attempt to take over Twitter.

Guys like Max Boot call for "more content moderation, not less"
because they fear someone may refute them or expose them for being
fiends and fools. It's that simple. They can't win in the marketplace
of ideas, so they seek to shut down the marketplace.


https://thinkr.org/newsletter/out-of-the-ashes-rebuilding-american-culture



Twitter buyout... Global $Gigabots publicly battling
for control of your mind, their battle being half the
programming session itself.




Twitter's Chickens Come Home To Roost

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/twitters-chickens-come-home-to-roost
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/who-will-fix-facebook-759916/

Elon Musk has reportedly attempted to purchase Twitter, and I have no
idea whether his influence on the company would be positive or not.

I do know, however, what other media figures think Musk’s influence on
Twitter will be. They think it will be bad — very bad, bad! How none
of them see what a self-own this is is beyond me. After spending the
last six years practically turgid with joy as other unaccountable
billionaires tweaked the speech landscape in their favor, they’re
suddenly howling over the mere rumor that a less censorious fat cat
might get to sit in one of the big chairs. O the inhumanity!

A few of the more prominent Musk critics are claiming merely to be
upset at the prospect of wealthy individuals controlling speech. As
more than one person has pointed out, this is a bizarre thing to be
worrying about all of the sudden, since it’s been the absolute reality
in America for a while.

    as someone who isn't a fan of Elon Musk, I still find it darkly
funny that billionaire-owned media is suddenly having a moral panic
about a billionaire possibly buying Twitter
    — David Sirota (@davidsirota) April 14, 2022

Probably the funniest effort along those lines was this passage:

    We need regulation… to prevent rich people from controlling our
channels of communication.

That was Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, railing against Musk in the
pages of… the Washington Post! A newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos
complaining about rich people controlling “channels of communication”
just might be the never-released punchline of Monty Python’s classic
“Funniest Joke in the World” skit.

Many detractors went the Pao route, suddenly getting religion about
concentrated wealth having control over the public discourse. In a
world that had not yet gone completely nuts, that is probably where
the outrage campaign would have ended, since the oligarchical control
issue could at least be a legitimate one, if printed in a newspaper
not owned by Jeff Bezos.

However, they didn’t stop there. Media figures everywhere are openly
complaining that they dislike the Musk move because they’re terrified
he will censor people less. Bullet-headed neoconservative fussbudget
Max Boot was among the most emphatic in expressing his fear of a
less-censored world:

    I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk
acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything
goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not
less.
    — Max Boot 🇺🇦 (@MaxBoot) April 14, 2022

In every newsroom I’ve ever been around, there’s always one sad hack
who’s hated by other reporters but hangs on to a job because he
whispers things to management and is good at writing pro-war
editorials or fawning profiles of Ari Fleischer or Idi Amin or other
such distasteful media tasks. Even that person would never have been
willing to publicly say something as gross as, “For democracy to
survive, it needs more censorship”! A professional journalist who
opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical
impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon
the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.

Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists
no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties,
but rather as people who live inside the rope-lines and defend those
pieties. I’m guessing this latest news is arousing special horror
because the current version of Twitter is the professional
journalist’s idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn’t exist,
everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled (“age-restricted”
content seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is
constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny,
and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what
the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put
in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious
Thought-Starbucks.

My blue-checked friends in media worked very hard to create this
thriving intellectual paradise, so of course they’re devastated to
imagine that a single rich person could even try to walk in and upend
the project. Couldn’t Musk just leave Twitter in the hands of
responsible, speech-protecting shareholders like Saudi Prince Alwaleed
bin Talal?

    Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and his company Kingdom Holding,
which have held big stakes in Twitter, dismissed Elon Musk’s offer to
buy the social-media platform https://t.co/0snqiLPtlu
    — The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 14, 2022

    Interesting. Just two questions, if I may.

    How much of Twitter does the Kingdom own, directly & indirectly?

    What are the Kingdom’s views on journalistic freedom of speech?
    — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2022

Even though it hasn’t happened yet, why wait to start comparing Musk’s
Twitter takeover to the Fourth Reich? Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis
of CUNY certainly thinks it isn’t too soon:

    Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub
at the twilight of Weimar Germany.
    — Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) April 14, 2022

The most incredible reaction in my mind came not from a journalist per
se, but former labor secretary Robert Reich. His Guardian piece, “Elon
Musk’s vision for the internet is dangerous nonsense,” is a marvel of
pretzel-logic, an example of what can happen to a smart person who
thinks he’s in Plato’s cave when he’s actually up his own backside.
The opening reads:

    The Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine
because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting
propaganda and lies.

    Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of
democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like
Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that
assumption was.

Reich goes on to argue… well, he doesn’t actually argue, he just makes
a series of statements that don’t logically follow one another, before
dismounting into a remarkable conclusion:

    Musk says he wants to “free” the internet. But what he really aims
to do is make it even less accountable than it is now… dominated by
the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be
accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science or the common good.

    That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of
every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on
Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.

Reich starts by talking about how Vladimir Putin is cracking down
using overt censorship, progresses to talking about how making the
Internet less “accountable” is bad, then ends by saying Musk is like
Putin, and Trump, and every evildoer on earth, again before Musk has
even done anything at all. He may be trying to say that Musk could use
algorithms to silently push reality in the direction he favors, but
this is the exact opposite of Vladimir Putin passing laws outlawing
certain kinds of speech. Any attempt to argue that dictators are also
speech libertarians is automatically ridiculous.

More to the point, where has all this outrage about private control
over speech been previously? I don’t remember people like Reich and
Jarvis, or Parker Molloy, or Scott Dworkin, or Timothy O’Brien at
Bloomberg (“Elon Musk’s Twitter Investment Could Be Bad News for Free
Speech”), bemoaning the vast power over speech held by people like
Sergei Brin, Larry Page, or even Jack Dorsey once upon a time. That’s
because the Bluenoses in media and a handful of hand-wringers on the
Hill successfully paper-trained all those other Silicon Valley
heavyweights, convincing them to join on with their great
speech-squelching project.

It’s become increasingly clear over the last six years that these
people want it both ways. They don’t want to break up the surveillance
capitalism model, or come up with a transparent, consistent,
legalistic, fair framework for dealing with troublesome online speech.
No, they actually want tech companies to remain giant black-box
monopolies with opaque moderation systems, so they can direct the
speech-policing power of those companies to desired political ends.

When someone like Reich says, “Billionaires like Musk have shown time
and again they consider themselves above the law. And to a large
extent, they are,” he’s talking about an authoritarian framework that
already exists in the speech world, just with different billionaires
at the helm. What’s got him cheesed off isn’t the concept of
privatized civil liberties — we’re already there — but the idea that
one particular billionaire might not be on board with the kinds of
arbitrary corporate decisions Reich likes, like removing Trump
(“necessary to protect American democracy,” he says).

When I first started to cover the content-moderation phenomenon back
in 2018, I was repeatedly told by colleagues that I was worrying over
trivialities, that there couldn’t possibly be any negative fallout to
coordinated backroom deals to de-platform the likes of Alex Jones, or
to the Senate demanding Facebook, Twitter, and Google start zapping
more “Russian disinformation” accounts. Even when I pointed out that
it wasn’t just right-wingers and Russians vanishing, but also
Palestinian activists and police brutality sites and a growing number
of small independent news outlets, most of my colleagues didn’t care.
Because they were so sure they’d never be targeted, the credentialed
media were mostly all for the most aggressive possible conception of
“content moderation.”

It was beyond obvious that self-described progressives would
eventually regret hounding people like Mark Zuckerberg to start
getting into the editorial business, and that pushing Silicon Valley
to take a bigger interest in controlling speech was flirting with
disaster. Of course they would someday wake up to find these companies
owned by people less sympathetic to their niche political snobbery,
and be horrified, and wish they’d never urged virtually unregulated
tech oligopolies to start meddling in the speech soup.

Now, here we are. To all those people who are flipping out and
shuddering over the possibilities (CNBC: “If he owns the whole place…?
The Orange man is probably going to be back!”), remember that you
didn’t mind when other unaccountable tycoons started down this road.
You cheered it on, in fact, and backlash from someone with different
political opinions and real money was 100% predictable. This is the
system you asked for. Buy the ticket, take the ride, you goofs!