Posted on 04/27/2022 2:57:54 PM PDT by Rummyfan
This week, in one of the most shocking business moves in recent memory, Twitter reversed itself and decided to sell itself after all to Elon Musk, who paid some $44 billion for the privilege. The move was made, at least in part, for ideological reasons; Musk has been vocally critical of Twitter’s management of information flow. Immediately upon the news of the buyout breaking, Musk tweeted, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functional democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
...
All of these seem like worthwhile and anodyne goals. More speech, not less. More transparency, not less.
And yet the political Left went utterly insane. Charles Blow of The New York Times vowed to leave the service; in fact, #LeavingTwitter trended on the service. The American Civil Liberties Union, while noting that Musk is a card-carrying member, fretted, “there’s a lot of danger having so much power in the hands of any one individual.” Meanwhile, powerful individual with consolidated power Jeff Bezos worried over the possibility of Chinese influence on Twitter: “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the deal “dangerous for our democracy.” MSNBC’s Ari Melber hilariously agonized, “You could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the elections.”
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Sure does…
The way they obsessed over outlier FoxNews did it first.
The irony……
Leftists…
K-12th grade
Colleges
MSM
Social media
Only one voice needs to be heard.
All the things THEY did to Trump...
Reveals? We’ve known all along. I get the distinct impression there are billionaires like Trump and Musk who are mining Free Republic for extremely valuable gems of actionable information.
There is a platform with no rules and where there is total freedom of expression for everybody. and it seems everyone on the globe has been accessing it for years and been much better off for it. It’s called the internet that has every form of information, misinformation, bots, ridicule, hate speech, virtue signaling, helpful and unhelpful advice, etc. and the amazing thing is that everyone keeps coming back...that is, except to CNN+ which is proof most people, without help from a censor with an agenda, can distinguish fact from fiction. Wonder if those who oppose Elon’s free speech absolutism would also advocate shutting down the internet. I would love to hear the book burners’ arguments for restricting it. No, not you, President Xi. The Democrat Party here has already advanced your argument
So have I. Either these billionares are very intelligent or they frequent Free Republic; most likely both.
Anodyne + goals. Interesting writing.
an·o·dyne
/ˈanəˌdīn/
adjective
not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.
Similar:
bland
inoffensive
innocuous
neutral
unobjectionable
unexceptionable
unremarkable
commonplace
dull
tedious
run-of-the-mill
noun
a painkilling drug or medicine.
“she had even refused anodynes”
The weird thing here is, that if it’s so unremarkable, commonplace, dull, run-of-the-mill, inoffensive
innocuous
neutral
unobjectionable
unexceptionable
unremarkable
then why are there so many objections to such an unobjectionable approach towards free speech?
I suppose that’s what this article investigates.
. . . and interesting as well since 82 million Americans voted to put every US nuclear weapon in the hands of a man who shakes hands with the air.
Edumacation starts at K and must continue throughout their life.
O’Brien to Winston, 1984:
“I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
The irony……
***OMG, that reminds me of the original post on FR:
OH the Hugh Manatee!
I don’t have a picture/meme to post, but it would be appropriate here.
The horror
the amazing thing is that everyone keeps coming back...
***My problem is that... early on in the internet thing, we had our various search engines. Then there was a search engine war, and Google won. Because theirs was the fastest with the mostest.
But google has turned that into an advertising shiitefest, plus it appears they might have had the backing of tons and tons of military storage hardware all along.
So where do we go for our first step into the internet, once again? I remember using Lynx, typing in website addresses, using the BBS system, then there was Mosaic, Lycos/askJeeves/Yahoo/infoseek/webcrawler/AltaVista
and the web browser/search wars.
I like Conservapedia and duck duck go, but I think DDgo uses the google search engine.
I keep saying that JimRob should license out this platform. DISQUS did sumthin similar and has hundreds of millions of subscribers.
I opened a thread on it and it was scrubbed.
I agree about google putting biased algorithms in the search engine.I use duck duck go too. I was referring to the fact that one can publish whatever one wants on the internet. The weak link is the search engines. Maybe Musk would consider his next project taking an unbiased search engine to market that has open code for transparency of its algorithms. There is definitely a market for that among free speechers and conservatives and even the few liberals that have an open mind
I was ahead of the times. I thought this was true in 2007 and that someone might pick up on Duncan Hunter as a great AmericaFirst type of candidate. I even got his son to post an interactive press release here on FR, posting as DuncanHunterAmbassador. Someone else followed that up with an interview with Duncan Hunter himself.
But neither Duncan Hunter nor Sarah Palin had a cool $Billion in their back pocket. Trump did, and he attached himself to our cause.
I’ve been hoping there are other conservative multimillionaires looking at the current situation realizing there’s $Billions left on the table. Elon is the first to move on it.
Anxiously looking forward to seeing some of that transparency.
Especially the history of moderators and their justifications for their one sided blocking and banning of only conservatives.
The left does not debate; they lie, accuse, and name-call.
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