One of the things that made President Donald Trump so effective when he was in office was his willingness to stand in the breach against the Democrats, come hell or high water — as we saw with the border, no matter how much he was attacked. Not everyone would have the kind of persistence and many might crumble.
Right now, Elon Musk is standing in the breach at Twitter and that’s causing a huge liberal meltdown.
Even as liberals are predicting the death of Twitter, they remain on Twitter, and Twitter usage rises. And the liberals are fleeing the company, which can only be a good thing for speech on the site in the future. As our friends at Twitchy noted, what Musk is likely doing is “whaling and culling” — pushing the envelope until he only has the most productive people remaining. Then, if he finds he needs more people after the culling, he’ll hire from the ample number of tech people out there. While there’s a lot of focus on Twitter, many tech folks are being let go from a lot of companies, so he will have a large supply from which to choose.
But Democrats keep trying to rope Musk in.
I wrote about how Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) colluded with a Washington Post reporter to impersonate him, then complain that Musk was allowing “impersonations.” This, even though Musk has spoken out against impersonations and moved quickly to stop such things. Now, Markey is ramping up the threats, joined by other Democrats to call on the FTC to go after Twitter.
Seven Democratic senators sent a letter on Thursday to the Federal Trade Commission, warning that Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk, was acting in disregard of users and urging the agency to investigate any breach of a consent decree that the FTC inked with Twitter.
The lawmakers, including Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren, asked the agency to consider enforcement actions against the company and against individual executives where appropriate.
“In recent weeks, Twitter’s new Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk, has taken alarming steps that have undermined the integrity and safety of the platform, and announced new features despite clear warnings those changes would be abused for fraud, scams, and dangerous impersonation,” the lawmakers said in a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan.
Here’s Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) making it clear that they’re going to be going after him — they’re that afraid that they no longer have control.
Musk has said that he wants free speech on Twitter and he’s gone a long way out there, despite attacks from liberals. While he’s not a conservative, he’s infinitely better than who we had in control of Twitter. You know that, by how mad liberals are at Musk and how desperate they are to get him into line.
On Friday, he proved he wants a different, more open environment, bringing back folks who have been suspended, like the Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson.
In being brought back, the Bee was not required to get rid of the tweet that caused them to get suspended.
There’s no word yet on Trump, but presumably, that would be on the horizon shortly, particularly since he just declared for 2024.
Musk has also shown that he’s willing to listen to people, and adapt, as he has done in allowing people back on the site. It’s quite something to see the owner of a company paying much attention to the opinion of the people.
But Musk is now hearing from a lot of people who have an opinion about his latest comment concerning a new speech policy.
New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
Note, this applies just to the individual tweet, not the whole account
The problem with this is that you would still have someone deciding what was “negative/hate” so what qualifies would depend on who is making the decisions. That’s a problem if you’re talking about freedom of speech. What makes it different from what Twitter had been doing is that it’s punishing the tweet, not the person, the person’s account doesn’t get banned or shadowbanned. But it naturally raised a lot of questions and he got flooded with concerns from all sides of the aisle. Given the reaction, I’m thinking that we’re going to see a refinement of that “policy.”
