SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk answers a question from the press in front of the Crew Dragon that is being prepared for the Demo-2 mission, at SpaceX Headquarters, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019 in Hawthorne, CA. Photo credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
Many Twitter users thought that the company’s purchase by Elon Musk would free them from the constraints imposed by the team led by former CEO Jack Dorsey. That seemed to be the way of it until big corporations began to put pressure on Musk. In The Spectator, David Marcus explains how he believes Musk is selling out Twitter (now renamed X) users for profits. He writes:
Elon Musk, the owner of X — once known as Twitter, may she rest in peace — is making Americans an offer that they must refuse. When he purchased the social media platform last year for a whopping $44 billion, he led us to believe he was doing it in order to save free speech, an ideal in regard to which he said was an absolutist. Today, what he is actually offering instead is a censorship regime slightly more friendly to the right than his predecessor. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Back during the bad old Twitter days of Jack Dorsey, most of us had a fairly consistent idea of how the site should moderate its content. The demand was for a simple, discrete set of rules banning things like violent threats or doxxing, but which did not punish users for their ideological viewpoints or opinions. We thought that was what Musk had in mind when he purchased the blue bird; in reality, the richest man on earth found out it wasn’t so easy.
The bottom line that Musk discovered is that without censorship of a pretty virulent variety, he can’t make a dime off of his shiny new toy. That is because advertisers are very careful about having their pitches to the public land right below @AmericanRawDog3030’s tweet just asking questions about whether Jews run everything — or for that matter, a post that misgenders people.
But Musk needs these ad dollars, not to mention staying in compliance with governmental hate speech laws — so he and his team have taken to poetry to convince us that a little censorship really isn’t so bad. “Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” was their first Orwellian little ditty, as if the concept of free speech does not involve access to an audience. Last week, X CEO Linda Yaccarino introduced the novel concept of speech that was “lawful but awful” and must be suppressed. Worst Dr. Seuss book ever.
Musk is in a tough spot. His principles demand free speech, his pocket book demands censorship, so he has to compromise — and that’s where his offer to all of us comes in. Musk wants us to accept a censorship regime that is fair to conservatives, and not skewed towards leftist ideology.
This was clear when he recently announced that the term “cis” would be considered a slur on Twitter and repeated offenders would face suspension. Musk is essentially saying, “I can’t protect your right to use the wrong pronoun, the advertisers won’t allow it, but I can stick it to the left on words that they like, too! Deal?”
No.
First of all this Faustian bargain obliterates the principle of free speech — but more practically, even if Musk does manage the thread the needle of bias and be a “censor for the common good” with X, he is legitimizing broader censorship efforts, at Facebook, Google and other major corporations that will continue to be biased against the right. Let’s just say, they won’t be banning the word “cis” anytime soon.
To make matters egregiously worse, we now know that Musk intends X not just to be a global town square, as he first claimed, but rather an “everything app” along the lines of WeChat in China. You’ll do your banking there, for example. But what happens if you run afoul of some new social norm that gets you banned from X — and from your money?
Read more here.
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