Posted on 04/15/2022 4:52:20 AM PDT by billorites
News Thursday morning that the outspoken serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter and take it private has surfaced widespread anxieties within the knowledge-class industries that free speech and even societal peace will be jeopardized if the Tesla CEO lifts content restrictions from journalists' favorite social media platform.
"I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter," wrote Max Boot, columnist for The (Jeff Bezos–owned) Washington Post, on Twitter. "He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less."
Boot is a longtime apocalyptic troll—past lowlights include declaring that "I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump," and advocating the Federal Communications Commission go after Fox News to forestall "the plot against America." But his anxiety about allegedly unfettered free speech is revealingly common in media, academia, Silicon Valley, and the government.
"For somebody with a lot of money to just come in and say, 'Look, I'm going to buy a part of this company, and therefore my voice as to how your rules are adopted and enforced is going to have more power than anybody else's' — I think that's regressive after years of [Twitter] trying to make sensible rules," University of California, Irvine, law professor and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression David Kaye was quoted in Vox on Tuesday. "Twitter has stepped away from this idea of it being the free speech wing of the free speech party, and being a more realistic custodian of speech on the platform."
Those "realistic" and "sensible" rules Twitter has adopted include banning thousands of political provocateurs (including then-President Donald Trump in 2021), suspending entire news organizations for publishing stories that turned out to be largely true, creating warning labels for COVID-19 "misinformation," strengthening filters for allegedly threatening speech, and so on.
"After all that, bringing Musk onto the board seems like a big step backward," former Reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao wrote last week in The Washington Post. "Musk calls himself a 'free-speech absolutist,' but like many 'free speech' advocates, he willfully ignores that private companies are free to establish some limits on their platforms."
At the core of these objections is the notion (misguided, in my view) that social media platforms, once they achieve a certain ubiquity, should be treated less like private companies, and more like utilities—subject to robust government regulation in the name of both the greater good and the protection of historically disadvantaged minorities.
"Musk's appointment to Twitter's board shows that we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication," Pao wrote. "For starters, we need consistent definitions of harassment and of content that violates personal privacy….If platforms continue to push for growth at all costs — without such regulations — people will continue to be harmed. The people harmed will disproportionately be those who have been harmed for centuries — women and members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The people who benefit from unrestricted amplification of their views will also be the same people who have benefited from that privilege for centuries." Today in Supreme Court History: April 14, 1873
The notion that unfettered speech hurts minorities hardest, therefore justifying protections against hate speech, is belied both by the history of the gay civil rights movement in America (as spelled out in Reason by Jonathan Rauch), and also by the experience in 1930s Germany, as Jacob Mchangama, author of the recent Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, explained in February to Nick Gillespie.
But those Hitler analogies can be just too tempting to fact-check. "Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany," tweeted City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who has otherwise spent much of the last two decades celebrating the "death of the gatekeeper."
Musk, love him or hate him, makes for an odd authoritarian. An immigrant who built a fortune on clean-energy companies, an entrepreneur who (along with competitors) showed what nongovernmental industry can accomplish in space, the pot-smoking former Saturday Night Live host has shown zero interest in running for public office or recruiting jack-booted thugs to enforce his preferences. And yet it's not just silly lefties like Robert Reich comparing the guy to actual evildoers.
"The world's richest man — someone who used to be compared to Marvel's Iron Man — is increasingly behaving like a movie supervillain, commanding seemingly unlimited resources with which to finance his mischief-making," Felix Salmon wrote in Axios.
Added former Chicago Tribune metro editor Mark Jacob: "Elon Musk is bad news. He should start his own platform, maybe Oligarch Social, and leave Twitter alone."
Perhaps ironically, the social-media-as-public-utility mindset is being embraced not just by a growing number of left-of-center knowledge-class professionals, but by some of their antagonists in the nascent trad-con right. "Twitter should be a public utility controlled by a rightly-ordered state," Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule tweeted today. "Short of that, I'm not sure I care which particular billionaires use it as an ideological playpen."
Populism of all ideological flavors tends to treat not just government but constitutional principles as instruments, to be used bluntly against ideological opponents. Twitter may have had some libertarian, anything-goes roots, but in the Trump era especially the company has become both the professional plaything and ideological piñata of the white-collar left.
Reich, helpfully, laid out the stakes this morning: "Trump must never be allowed back on Twitter."
I don’t believe he really wants to buy Twitter. I’m beginning to think that this is some publicity ploy by Musk to improve his brand.
“For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”
Tesla’s are selling like hotcakes. I don’t think he needs to improve his brand - but who knows. My impression is that he is tired of the woke crowd controlling speech. When he moved operations out of California he went from being a darling of the left to a pariah. He saw firsthand how out of touch and wannabe controlling the left truly is.
I think it is much simpler than that.
The old pump and dump.
Make a bunch of money in a short period of time.
Talk about clueless! Boot sounds like a wannabe dictator. But then, so do so many on the left.
Billionaires, from what I’ve observed, usually have three objectives when they do stuff like this.
1. They want to cost other billionaires money, by forcing them to buy almost against their will because they would lose if they don’t act. Billionaires are often in an unsaid war with each other to try and push each other down.
2. Publicity.
3. By having somebody buy Twitter for him, it will push up the stock price and allow him to sell out at a profit, unless he bought them long-term, which I doubt. I can’t see Twitter being around for many years.
However, I think he would have followed through, if the board couldn’t find an alternative buyer.
He did it with Bitcoin, when he offered to sell cars through Bitcoin.
OUR DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE!!!
Not really.
When they say things like this, you can be absolutely certain that what they mean by “democracy” is nothing of the sort. Sure, you will get to vote, but it will be utterly meaningless and change nothing, ever.
The form of government most like what they want is best seen in Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
He’s virtue-signaling to his boss and Woke readers by repeating the “party line.”
It was astonishing.
Like the Leftists in America in 1941 who caused whiplash in those observing them when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union (performing a stunning 180 reversal instantaneously going from full antiwar pacifists to full-on war cheerleaders) the Left has gone from completely and fiercely embracing Section 230 protections for Twitter (to protect Twitter and Facebook from "right wing lawsuits") to full throated spittle-lipped, bug-eyed fervent activists for the removal of Section 230 protections that "Tech Billionaires" shouldn't be able to take advantage of! They should be open to lawsuits for slander and misinformation like everyone else!
I listened to this reversal from the likes of Joe Scarborough with an odd and jarring combination of disbelief and jaded acceptance. I couldn't believe I was hearing it, yet I didn't expect to hear anything else.
And like the Leftist Communist Sympathizers in 1941, they make no apologies and feel no shame at the instantaneous reversal. If they were asked to explain (they weren't and aren't) they simply would ignore the question, pushing the hypocritical reversal further and further into the past towards irrelevance.
Astonishing.
Elon Musk is no conservative. But he is an enemy of the left in one of the single most important battlefields of our lifetime: Freedom of Speech. We saw the damage done in this last election due to censorship.
In that light, I accept Elon Musk, even with his lips planted firmly on the teat of government money, subsidies, and even Chinese money, as a full ally.
I see that the hysterical left is losing its mind over Musk’s possible takeover. That tells me that twitter and the other “social media” were created PRECISELY TO take away free speech and to control thought. They were implemented to ferret out dissenters, to identify them, and to silence them.
The social media are not just platforms to post pictures of the dog. They are one of the primary means by which the left silences dissidents.
Twitter employees, who I’ll call twits, are now all in a snit over Musk. The snowflakes are having a meltdown, and will soon be needing to retreat to a safe space with a therapy dog.
Great observations, and I fully agree.
The irony is really lost on these morons isn't it?
Twatter is Oligarch Central!!!
Any person that can put so many leftists into a tizzy is a great guy and ally in my book.
Atty Boy Elon.
“...He should start his own platform, maybe Oligarch Social, and leave Twitter alone.”
___________________________________________________
Oh quite the opposite...he should take over Twitter and do to the Political Left precisely what they have done to the Right.
“Tesla’s are selling like hot cakes”
6 month wait to buy one around here. I test drove one because my daughter is a Musk fan and it was a pretty decent vehicle. Fastest acceleration of any stock car I have driven recently.
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