The reason Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter couldn’t be clearer: more freedom of speech on a platform that, like it or not, has become Earth’s “de facto” town square, as he put it.
Twitter, along with just about all the Big Tech giants, uses dirty algorithms and misleading information to shoot down conservative voices in the name of battling false and misleading information.
We know the drill.
It steered users away from clicking on New York Post’s consequential Hunter Biden laptop story by posting warnings such as “potentially unsafe” and warned that the story contained “hacked materials.” It banned and suspended the accounts that it said spread false information about COVID-19, including Dr. Robert Malone, innovator of mRNA technology.
Twitter shadow-bans prominent conservatives whose views it dislikes. And it permanently banned Donald Trump’s account but kept the accounts of Iran’s ayatollah, Chinese propagandists, Vladmir Putin, Venezuela’s dictator Nicholas Maduro, and Louis Farrakhan.
As with so many issues today, we’re supposed to pretend none of this is happening even as Twitter’s tyrannical bias poisons the public discourse.
So a $43 billion buyout bid out of the blue from the planet’s wealthiest man is a breath of fresh air – a glitch in the algorithm.
“We want to have the perception and the reality that speech is as free as possible,” Musk told TED2022 conference head Chris Anderson onstage in Vancouver, British Columbia. “A good sign as to whether there’s free speech is: Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? And if that is the case, then we have free speech.”
Simple, but we live in strange times. A loud few in the freest country of the free world believe that more speech (code for more “conservative speech”) is a bad thing.
“Super-stressed” twits who tinker with Twitter’s algorithms went into a tizzy, last week, twisting Musk’s words to mean that his takeover would lead to some kind of digital dictatorship (code for “Trump’s account could be restored”).
“I can’t even with El*n buying Twitter,” tweeted Miguelyto (he/him) @miguelytob. “I may have to rethink my employment if that actually happens.”
MSNBC’s Mika Brezinski asked: “Are there any ways to stop him if he wants to buy Twitter?” “Are there any guardrails around something like this? Because this could be a very dangerous precedent.”
Then there was talk of Twitter board and media resistance with a poison pill (diminution) as part of adoption of a limited duration shareholder’s rights plan and, oh yes, Musk is an eccentric, racist, sexist bigot.
Musk was Twitter’s largest shareholder in early April but days later – surprise, surprise – the Vanguard Group disclosed that it now owns a 10 percent stake, with a March 31 date of event, which bumped Musk to No. 2. Morgan Stanley and BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset manager (and woke), is among Twitter’s top five shareholders.
Within the next couple of weeks, Musk could launch a tender offer, a tactic that bypasses the board and sells stock directly to shareholders. As he scrambles to raise the cash, he says he’s willing to put up $10 to $15 billion of his own money.
So, that’s where we are: Those who, like Musk, live and breathe inside an Algorithm of Freedom, and those who want to suffocate society inside an Algorithm of Tyranny. Twitter is just one of many battlefields where the two “algorithms” play out.
“Twitter’s a war zone,” Musk told Andrea Mitchell on 60 Minutes. Regardless of what its founders intended, the micro-blogger has taken on a life of its own. As horrific and as unsustainable as its business model has become, I can’t see Twitter disappearing.
It’s a digital no-man’s-land where common folk, kings, presidents, dictators, preachers, moguls, villains, heroes, and the media sit at computers in a metaverse-like world to rummage through a content gold mine of stuff that moves the course of life in the real world.
It’s even become a weapon for those suffering the blood of actual war, like in Ukraine.
In February, Ukraine’s government official handle posted a meme of a giant Adolf Hitler bending down to give a lamblike Vladimir Putin a congratulatory pat on the cheek. “This is not a ‘meme,’ but our and your reality right now,” it read. The meme went viral with two million likes and thousands of shares.
“Drunk Hulk,” the Twitter alter ego of writer and comedian Christian Dumais said Ukraine’s use of memes is clear: “A meme’s ability to re-contextualise what we’re seeing in the world in order to subvert, inspire, provoke, and educate is redefining how we can reach people,” said Dumais.
With that much power, it’s no surprise why those with big plans to transform America and the world meddle so loudly in the business of who’s at the helm at Twitter.
In his diabolical book COVID-19: The Great Reset, Klaus Schwab quotes Singapore academic Kishore Mahbubani who, using a boat metaphor, sees the world as being inextricably linked together.
“The 7 billion people who inhabit planet earth no longer live in more than one hundred separate boats [countries],” Mahbubani wrote in the early 2010s. “Instead, they all live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat.”
If the people who have big plans for the future of the world sees the world as some gargantuan Titanic, it’s no big leap to believe that Earth’s “de facto town square” could be a useful piece of machinery that helps woke governments, woke businesses, and the woke media to navigate the direction of the ship to suit their woke globalist vision.
If they get their way, we’re all headed for an iceberg. But as dead wrong as they are, these people fight to win, no matter who it destroys in the process.
I’m rooting for Musk, but to win the battle for Twitter, he’s going to need a much larger army behind him to fight the pathological forces who can’t seem to come to terms with the simple reason why he stuck his neck out in the first place: more freedom of speech.
Musk is making a great go at it, but even if he falls short, he’s done a great service in exposing Twitter, its board, and its woke supporters, exactly for who they are. It was a glitch they didn’t see coming.
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