We have through two political eras of social media, and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter opens up a third.
Ten years ago, social media corporations were hailed in the tech press and mainstream media as forces for progress. Twitter helping the Green Revolution through Iran. The vast collection of information about Obama’s 2012 crusade on Facebook “set off an alarm that its engineers had not foreseen. “or they were not aware of it,” according to testimonies of the time. Silicon Valley and knowledge experts in progressive crusades have been hailed as geniuses.
And then Donald Trump started tweeting. After the 2016 Brexit shocks and Trump’s election, social media corporations were branded evil. Seeing the full weight of politics fall on the valley, historian Niall Ferguson warned: “Make no mistake, 2016 will never happen again. Social media corporations have been accused of spreading “misinformation. “The conservative-aligned knowledge corporations that did only a fraction of Obama’s 2012 knowledge gathering have been portrayed as part of shadowy privacy-threatening conspiracies. We were told that Russia was such corporations to hack the brains of impressionable morons, and that only a shrewd follow-up of social media conversations through progressives could save the world from fascism. All social media corporations learned their lesson and started hiring new fact-checkers and progressive media censors. Facebook has appointed an arch-permanent anti-populist politician as head of global affairs.
The result has been an ethical panic over misinformation and the creation of unofficial partnerships between government agencies and Silicon Valley’s internal “security” boards. When we heard about the pandemic, the government started recommending the kind of tweets and posts it was looking for to see. Right-wing rhetorical bombers like Milo Yiannopoulos have been permanently banned. The discussion about the history of Hunter Biden’s computer in the run-up to the 2020 election has been deleted. After January 6, came a Twitter ban for Donald Trump. Voice codes have been used to force celebrities like Jordan Peterson to leave the site. But when illiterate people blind to the satire of Twitter’s anti-disinformation team embraced the Christian humor post Babylon Bee, they spurred billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk into action.
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On some level, this is surprising. Tech billionaires, like other new categories of wealth before them, are gaining media empires. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Laurene Powell Jobs bought the Atlantic. Musk bought the platform where the hounds of those publications hang out and spontaneously converge and create traditional wisdom.
In fact, Musk is not a conservative icon, and we are concerned about his close industrial ties to China, one of the world’s most oppressive enemies of free speech. But there are reasons to wish Musk well. Musk is an instinctive, nondoctrinaire, libertarian He is a champion of free speech at a time when progressives associate free speech with evil and oppression. He has already cleaned up the most sensible thing in the company, firing the CEO, the CFO and the director Vijaya Gadde, guilty of legal policy. Accept as true with and secure. She was the one who called for banning Trump.
The era of progressive surveillance began with the spread of erroneous data, Buzzfeed’s publication of Trump’s notorious dossier. It delayed discussion about the origins of Covid-19, suppression of data on the disease, and mitigation efforts that turned out to be true. And that’s news with holes in reminiscence that were true (Hunter Biden’s laptop). Progressive censorship has failed at all levels.
Just as we expect a long-term Republican Congress to conduct a thorough investigation into our nation’s public health response, we hope Musk’s takeover of Twitter will result in an audit of social media policies of that era.
A republic committed to freedom only desires free media, but media establishments committed to freedom of expression. On Musk’s Twitter, we can have this once again.