It was as if Voldemorte had resurfaced, announcing the immediate enslavement of humanity, except for hate speech enthusiasts, of course.
Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire and recent purchaser of 9.2% of Twitter, has stated his desire to make sure the principle of free speech is the top priority for the social media behemoth, and the media lost its collective mind.
Cue Mika Brzezinski.
"He can control exactly what people think. That's our job."
MSNBC's Mike Brzezinski on @elonmusk's Twitter purchase.
It's rooted in a social panic position (Musk is dangerous) and blinding media narcissism. pic.twitter.com/dHPBOp9BDU
— James DiFiore (@jamesdifiore) April 18, 2022
Co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Brzezinski was categorical when she accused Musk of trying to tell people what to think. Astonishingly, she followed that with this gem – “That’s our job.”
If I were Musk, I would cut an ad with that video immediately.
But Brzezinski isn’t the disease, she’s a symptom of a media who spent the last 2 decades trying to justify the way they deliver news, and what is news-worthy in the first place. Moreover, Twitter and other tech giants are on a mission to do exactly what Brzezinski accused Musk of doing – telling people what to think.
All one has to do is look at a timeline of banned Twitter accounts to see the pattern. The vast majority of these banishments were not merely alt-right trolls, racists, and misogynists. For example, when Canadian activist Meghan Murphy was banned for life because she referred to Jessica “wax my balls” Yaniv as a he, despite Yaniv’s insistence to be recognized as a female. The zero tolerance policy used by Twitter is a broad-brush of very, very far left orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that is rooted in unproven concepts like gender theory, where even a person with a track record of lying about who they are so they can prey on underage girls is viewed as a credible person if they claim to be transgender.
What could go wrong?
It turns out, the social engineering undertaken by social media companies usually collapses under the weight of its own shallowness once you begin to scrutinize or ask questions about the veracity of the ideas that prop up the rules. Just ask James Damore. Damore was a Google engineer who put out an essay criticizing Google’s strategy for closing the gender gap. The essay did not use hate speech or disinformation to prove its thesis. In fact, it was a very well-researched essay that had the audacity to state that sometimes certain jobs are better suited for certain genders. Even if he was transparently out to lunch by delivering that opinion, it remains stupefying that Google would fire him over it.
Actually, it is quite easy to explain; social media companies expect to be the only entities allowed to tell people what to think. Musk represents the glitch in the Twitterverse, a nemesis to the new breed of vernacular extremists who want the monopoly over our ideas.
Watch the media panic over Musk’s involvement, then ask yourself what they are really afraid of – spotlighting Musk’s fairly standard idea of what free speech means, or that someone powerful is challenging the conventional wisdom they declared for all of us.
