Twitter

They hate free speech and want you to think it’s dangerous.

There has been one salutary effect of the weeks-long efforts of Elon Musk to gain control of Twitter, and the debate over the freedom of speech that ensued: now the Left’s foremost individuals and institutions are out in the open about their hatred for the freedom of speech. The authoritarian heart of the Left has been exposed, as has their war against the foundational principle of any free society: the right to express oneself even if one’s opinions don’t coincide with those of the powerful and/or moneyed elites. Barack and Hillary hate the freedom of speech and want you to think it’s a dangerous toy, too dangerous for you to play with. And now three pillars of the unctuous and hypocritical Leftist “human rights” establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have come out against it as well.

Leftists clutched their pearls all throughout Wednesday after billionaire Elon Musk called out Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, for her censorship policies within the company.

Ending Big Tech censorship at Twitter will be trickier than it sounds, but it’s worth the struggle.

For Elon Musk, coming up with $44 billion was the easy part. What comes next, less so.

To the delight of many conservatives, Musk has purchased Twitter and announced that he will make the platform “an arena for free speech.” One can almost picture him storming into Twitter HQ, marching downstairs, and kicking in the rusty door to the content-moderation boiler room. Steam blows and bells ring as, with a mighty tug, he dislodges a giant iron lever from the “Less Speech” setting and wrenches it into the “More Speech” position. After a few more adjustments—a crank down on the “Spam” knob, a flip onward of the “Edit Tweet” switch—he returns to the lobby, instructs the astonished employees to stay out of the basement, and leaves.

Elon Musk bought Twitter. Conservatives appear cautiously optimistic about the platform’s future, with several prominent commentators noting that their follower counts rose significantly overnight. Still, some are concerned that Musk is not a conservative. They point to his public positions on climate change and support for left-wing organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Today’s big powerful companies could become tomorrow’s also-rans, no government intervention required.

Twitter is changing ownership, following a purchase by Elon Musk, who has explicitly  said he intends to reorient the company’s approach to online speech. Netflix, whose business model has long been predicated on sky’s-the-limit growth, is bleeding subscribers. CNN+, a massively expensive project from what was once a dominant force in TV news, is shutting down a month after its launch. Facebook is losing regular users and taking a huge financial hit because of changes in the mobile ad space. Google is no longer the world’s most popular website. 

The hyper-partisans of the cultural hegemony won’t leave Twitter. They need to access its casual users for their strategy to be successful.

With the recent acquisition of the world’s largest social media platform by billionaire Elon Musk, the battle cry of “I’m leaving Twitter” has rapidly spread among the bluecheck caste. The chances of this actually manifesting in any notable number of people jumping ship are next to zero. They aren’t going to move to another site, and they especially will not be moving to the much-touted Mastodon, the domain of basement-bound tech nerds so complex as to be rendered effectively useless to anyone without an MA in Programming.

Indeed, the impossibility of migrating from the Big Tech titans has already played out in the likes of Gab, Parler and Gettr. Social media falls strictly under the economic concept of a natural monopoly, its utility and functionality entirely derived from everyone sharing the same platform to maximise reach and facilitate wider interaction. In the same way there are not many competing railways built along the same routes, there will not be many competing Twitters.

h/t MC