ROGER SIMON: “Twitter delenda est.”
Maybe dominoes will begin to fall. After all, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, et al, can be defeated and rendered irrelevant with the non-click of a mouse. All you have to do is not do it.
So now is the time—there may never be a better—for all good men and women to leave Twitter—no excuses.
I know it’s hard not to promote your latest whatever, I know it’s always tempting to pronounce on Hunter’s laptop—assuming they let you—I know it’s fun to take potshots at this week’s inanity or insanity from AOC, but if you actually believe in the First Amendment, if you believe in Freedom of Speech, and if you are on Twitter, you are collaborating with and enabling people who by their actions—do I need to go through them?—don’t.
Ergo, you are a hypocrite.
That’s not so bad. Most of us are, to one degree or another. There’s a reason Diogenes spent so long looking for an honest man.
But in this case it is remarkably easy to harmonize your beliefs with your actions. As Nancy Reagan said in another context, “Just say no.”
In other words, deactivate your account. I promise you, difficult as it may seem, you will be relieved in the long run. I know I am.
More than that, as noted above, you will be taking a small step toward breaking the malign Big Tech hegemony.
That’s what we all should be doing before they have thoroughly brainwashed the planet, if they haven’t already.
And I am quite pleased my home senator, Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), has taken a solid step in the right direction as well, bypassing the endless haggling over Section 230. On April 26, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
“Today, I’m introducing the 21st Century Foundation for the Right to Express and Engage in Speech Act (or the 21st Century FREE Speech Act), which would restore the Bill of Rights—rather than the whims of big companies—as the guide for what Americans can say or hear in today’s public square.”
“My bill would (1) abolish Section 230, (2) treat Big Tech—defined as any interactive computer service platform with more than 100 million active monthly users world-wide—like a common carrier that must provide reasonable, nondiscriminatory access to all consumers, and (3) prohibit political censorship by Big Tech.”
Prohibit political censorship by Big Tech? But… but… but… Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos and those Google guys and gals know what’s best for us, no? (Who was that person who wrote that book “I Know Best”?)
Anyway, good for Hagerty. It’s easy to imagine the amount of money this proposal will cost his campaign fund just as it’s easy to imagine the amount that will go into funds aligned against it.
Turning Google, Facebook and Twitter into public utilities is not exactly what their owners or the Democratic Party—once, as I recall in the distant past, adherents of free speech—have in mind. In fact, much as I am rooting for Hagerty’s bill and will support it as much as I can, it will be fought as nothing before by this phony-liberal Congress and will take courage no Democrat has shown in years to pass.
So all the more reason “Twitter delenda est,” to borrow a phrase from Cato.
In addition to its high-tech totalitarianism, it’s a virus of the mind as well — somebody should write a book about the multifaceted elements of Twitter’s insidious nature.