Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

[grarpamp]

Savor The Great Musk Panic

paywalled

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/savor-the-great-musk-panic

The New York Times earlier this week ran a guest essay by Gawker
founding editor Elizabeth Spiers, fulminating about Elon Musk’s effort
to purchase Twitter. She wrote:

    What exactly does [Musk] believe can’t be said on the platform
right now? It certainly doesn’t take long to find discredited race
science, arguments that women are intellectually inferior,
antisemitism… It is easy to assume that the banned speech that Mr.
Musk is standing up for is worse even than that. As the comedian
Michael Che put it on “Saturday Night Live,” the $44 billion deal
shows “how badly white guys want to use the N-word.”



This is the elite argument against free speech in a nutshell: “If you
favor ‘all legal speech,’ you really just want to slander, threaten,
and harass. Now please let me tiptoe up to libel myself, as I tell
millions of New York Times readers I ‘assume’ you’re a racist itching
to use the N-word.”

The hypocrisy of America’s self-appointed culture-protectors this week
is breathtaking. They really seem not to realize that what they’ve
been seeking for years isn’t an end to speech abuses, but a monopoly
on them. They see Musk as a traitor to his class, threatening to upend
what they see as a natural order that in recent years placed bluenose
squads in deserved roles as vanguards and truth-arbiters. Whether or
not Musk ever upends anything is a different question, but critics
believe he will, and now they’re panicking, in tones of maximum
sanctimony. They’re even pulling out “Who will protect the
children?”-style language:

    My latest op-ed for the @latimes with @rashadrobinson :Under Elon
Musk's Twitter takeover, who will protect users?
https://t.co/uurD1vdZLW
    — Safiya Umoja Noble PhD (@safiyanoble) April 28, 2022

    When billionaires like Elon Musk justify their motives by using
“freedom,” beware. What they actually seek is freedom from
accountability.
    — Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 24, 2022

    Now that Elon Musk is buying Twitter, the question for all of us
is: Will he allow a Criminal who used this platform to lie and spread
disinformation to try to overthrow the US Government to return and
continue his Criminal activity? And if he does, how do we combat it?
    — Rob Reiner (@robreiner) April 25, 2022

I spent a good part of the last four years warning that asking
unaccountable billionaires to meddle more in speech would result in
exactly such a table-turning episode, in which the political
mainstream’s cocky censor squad would wake up one day to find the
wrong tycoon in charge, at which point they would cry foul and howl
suddenly about the evils of oligarchy. For failing to cheer their
vision of enlightened censorship, colleagues denounced me as a
reactionary pervert in the employ of (pick one) Trump/Assad/Putin. So
it’s hard to do anything but chuckle at their anguish this week.

According to mainstream legend, Twitter executives were forced to
re-think their hands-off, “free speech wing of the free speech party”
approach after watching the @RealDonaldTrump account become the
world’s most-followed news network during the 2016 election campaign.
In doing so, they upended the power of traditional news media figures
to filter out what they deemed unacceptable political candidates. The
Washington Post would later describe how anguished Twitter general
counsel Vijaya Gadde and CEO Jack Dorsey realized after Trump’s
election that their product had escaped its pen and needed putting
down:

    Twitter’s largely liberal employee base faced growing criticism,
and workers complained that the first question they were asked when
they told someone they worked at the social media service was, what
about Trump’s account? His account was even briefly deactivated once
by a rogue Twitter employee in 2017.

    By 2018, Dorsey and Gadde, whose title is legal, policy and trust
and safety lead, knew they had to rethink their approach to powerful
people’s megaphones. Executives began to devise new policies and
product features that would enable the company to place a specific
label to cover up a tweet.

The Post went on to describe a Shakespearean tragedy, in which
executives like Dorsey and Gadde tried, against all logic and
evidence, to cling to doomed speech principles throughout the Trump
presidency. Blind to their fate as all tragic figures must be, they
held on past the bitter end, leaving Trump’s account up long enough to
imperil democracy itself via the insurrection (democracy was always
“democracy itself” in the Trump years). January 6th in this version of
the story was clearly Twitter’s fault, caused by “a mob of Trump
supporters, following the president’s calls on Twitter,” as the Post
put it. When the company then belatedly did the right thing and
deactivated Trump’s account, the Post said it “brought to an end an
era of free speech online” that Twitter “itself helped create.”

That’s one version of history. I remember another.

...