Left-wing hysteria about Twitter has reached epic levels, and what’s really amazing about the frenzied opposition to the changes being made by Elon Musk and the new Twitter regime is that it reveals a basic mistrust in the ability of the American people to discern what is “disinformation” and what might be “propaganda.”
How damaging can it be to American democracy for voters to get information from sources across the political spectrum — from loony left to loony right and everything in between — and give the voter the opportunity to police his own content?
The left should just come out and say that Americans are too stupid to govern themselves and need the wisdom of left-wing censors to guide them to the “proper” sources — leftist-approved, of course — and hence the “proper” conclusions.
We don’t require citizens to pass a quiz about current events in order to vote. Nor do we give voters an intelligence test before they enter a polling booth. The American republic is imperfect because human beings are imperfect and susceptible to all kinds of “disinformation” — including the kind of disinformation that disguises itself as “reputable” news sources.
The Paul Pelosi story is an excellent example. Where right-wing news sources were pointing out (mostly) the duality of the attacker’s political statements, left-wing news sources tried to tie the attack to right-wing “hate speech” about Pelosi. Maybe voters should hear both sides of this argument? If the leftists had their way, social media would have stifled much of the discussion.
Now that the shackles have been taken off on Twitter, we’re seeing the idiotic children, the brain-dead, and the soulless haters vying with each other to see how much racist, sexist, hate-spewing content they can post before the censors kick in. Predictably, the left is calling for even more censorship.
215. That’s the number of mentions recorded every five seconds on Twitter for a racial slur when hateful content on the platform peaked on Saturday evening, Bloomberg reported. This represented a 1,700% spike. Several activists also pointed out that Musk’s takeover had prompted several bad actors to test the water by tweeting out racial, homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs.
At a time when Twitter’s content policy was under the scanner, Musk himself drew sharp criticism over the weekend after tweeting out an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. The now deleted tweet included a link to an article from the Santa Monica Observer—a website known to share fake news.
Musk shared an article that was purely speculative and unproven. Are people unable to decide whether an article — since taken down — that discusses the idea that Paul Pelosi was involved with a male prostitute in some way is fiction or not?
Trust the people. If leaders don’t do that, then the American experiment is over. If the leaders don’t trust the people, how can the people trust the leaders? This is especially true when the elites treat the American people like little children who need to be led around by the nose and shown what they need to know.
In the larger sense, political players are worried that Musk’s promises to bring Twitter’s policies closer in line with his own ideas about politics and society, as well as his firing of its top accountability executives, will permanently change a platform they’ve come to rely on, and trust to police misinformation and hate speech.
Or perhaps the left is worried about a CEO who means what he says about “freedom of expression”?
Late on Saturday Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, tweeted that the company’s content moderation policies “hadn’t changed.” Musk himself pointed to Roth’s tweet to assuage concerns raised by NBA star LeBron James, following a report of a 500% increase of racial slurs on the platform 12 hours after Musk’s takeover.
And when a user suggested that Roth should be fired, Musk tweeted that: “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”
Would Twitter’s old boss Jack Dorsey say, “we’re all entitled to our political beliefs” and keep someone who disagrees with him on board?
The leftists should just chill. Yes, there’s been a huge increase in racial, homophobic, and ethnic slurs on Twitter since Musk took over. Talk to me in a month and ask the same question. My guess is that after a while, the haters will find another shiny object to play with and be a lot less of a problem.
Meanwhile, content that the left thinks should be banned will probably be allowed to be posted. And the world will still be standing in the aftermath of the election, and the United States will still be intact. Perhaps the left’s biggest fear is that people will realize they don’t need them to make decisions on who to vote for and will actually begin to tune them out.
All hail “misinformation!”
