Who’s Afraid of Elon Musk?
Or is that the question that really needs to be asked?
Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter has triggered a reaction from many of our media and cultural elites that has been both stunning and revelatory.
On its “About” page, Twitter describes itself as “an open service that’s home to a world of diverse people, perspectives, ideas, and information.” This, the page continues, is because it “matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk.”
Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Pretty, well, open (just like it says), right? Democratic. Unbiased. A safe space for people to freely share their ideas, right?
So why would the buyout of Twitter by a multi-billionaire and self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” elicit the kind of reactions we’ve been seeing?
Could it be that their reactions are revealing a reality of Twitter that contradicts its self-proclaimed mission of being “an open service” for everyone?
Political reality
The New York Post has certainly felt that “other reality” of the “Twitterverse.” On October 14, 2020 — just 20 days before the presidential election — the Post broke a story containing evidence from Hunter Biden’s laptop that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, had full knowledge of his son’s shady business dealings and even met a top exec at the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter held a board seat. This evidence flew in the face of Joe Biden’s repeated denials of such knowledge.
This evidence was also squashed — by Twitter itself. Treating the Post like a journalistic adolescent (rather than as the over-200-year-old journalistic institution that it is), Twitter locked the Post out of its account for 17 days — right up to the election itself. It also blocked anyone from re-tweeting the story.
This, of course, is the same Twitter than repeatedly ran with “evidence” of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 — evidence that was nowhere to be found at the end of the 2-year Mueller investigation.
I might add that, per one media watchdog, Twitter (along with the rest of social media) has silenced critics of the current administration over 600 times in the last 2 years. This same report states that, per the Heritage Foundation, Twitter censors conservatives at twenty-one times the rate of liberals.
Cultural reality
Unfortunately, Twitter censorship hasn’t been confined to politics. It also forces itself upon anyone who dares to question certain cultural narratives. Just ask Dr. Robert Malone, who dared to speak up about the harmful side effects of the Pfizer Covid vaccine. His reward: a permanent ban from Twitter. Never mind that Dr. Malone invented the very mRNA technology behind the vaccines. The Twitter overlords obviously knew more about this than he did.
In July 2020, several Twitter users contacted the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to report that their accounts had been blocked for “harmful imagery.” The problem was that none of them was quite sure exactly what “hateful imagery” Twitter was referring to — unless it was the Star of David that they all used.
OK, then surely Twitter has dealt harshly with Iranian leader Khameini, Jr. for his anti-Semitic tweets — you know, stuff like calling Israel a “cancerous tumor” that “will be uprooted and destroyed.” Oh wait a minute: he’s still tweeting freely.
Or what about Professor Mark Alfano taking to Twitter to applaud the death of a Trump supporter and calling such deaths “comedy?” Twitter’s reaction was a deafening silence.
Oh but don’t worry: Twitter did find the time to suspend Pastor Dave Scarlett for — horror of horrors — tweeting on Good Friday a picture of Jesus on the cross with the words, “It is finished.”
OK, so what about the reaction?
As I mentioned at the beginning, perhaps the most stunning component of Musk’s buyout has been the reaction it’s elicited from many of our cultural luminaries. Consider this from Ari Melber of MSNBC: “You own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s political candidates 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 election.”
Who knew that MSNBC had political experts who were less than 18 months old? Obviously, Ari Melber’s not old enough to have heard the words, “Hunter Biden laptop.”
Or how ‘bout this from Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley: “It’s always a concern when an oligarch may be owning the town square.”
Gee, Jeff, why haven’t we heard you fuming about, uh, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg? Is he not also a billionaire? Does that qualify him as an “oligarch,” too?
Oh wait, I forgot: Mark Zuckerberg donated $419 million to progressive non-profits ahead of the 2020 elections. And Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post also ran cover for Joe Biden in October 2020. So, I guess that gets them both off the “oligarch” hook.
The whole gamut of reactions is too numerous to recount in this post. But suffice it to say they’re all stunning not only in their hyperventilation but also in their stunning lack of self-awareness.
What this all boils down to
Amidst all of this hubbub, a video has resurfaced of MSNBC host Mike Brzezinski charging then-President Trump with using Twitter (before he was banned, obviously) to “control what people think.” She then said, “that’s our job.”
Now to be fair to Mika, perhaps the words “that’s our job” were meant to convey that it’s the media’s job to report — not to control. At least that’s what she claimed after the fact. But as the old adage goes, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
Certainly, the reactions to Elon Musk’s buyout indicate where those hearts are. They are all about controlling the information flow — quite the opposite of Twitter’s purported mission.
So the real question is not, “Who’s afraid of Elon Musk?” The real question is, “Who’s afraid of free speech?”
