Elon Musk Buys Twitter. Left Melts Down.
If you aren’t on Twitter you may not understand the magnitude of what happened yesterday when billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform. Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist.”
Just what Twitter needs.
Naturally, lefties are apoplectic. They believed they owned Twitter. Now that the popular platform is owned by someone who ostensibly believes in free speech for all, they’re terrified.
For those of us with right-of-center opinions, it means we will no longer have to speak in code to avoid being censored. Frankly, that’s going to take some getting used to.
Twitter is huge and a ban meant that voices were effectively silenced. None of Twitter’s competitors could touch the original. According to Backlink, Twitter had 396.5 million users in January. Of those, 206 million use Twitter daily. The platform is most popular with 25-34 year olds.
Hmmmm. I’m a lot older than 34 and I use Twitter.
A lot.
I like the platform. I like the discipline of making a point in just 280 characters. I like being part of a community of like-minded people. I like to hear what smart people are saying about current affairs. I like the immediacy.
I haven’t liked toning down my opinions, or couching them in words that aren’t likely to attract the attention of the left-wing sourpuss sentinels at Twitter. One careless word could cost you your account.
I joined Twitter in the summer of 2008, just before I left to cover the two national political conventions for The Virginian-Pilot. I live-Tweeted the Democrats in Denver and the Republicans in Minneapolis to my half a dozen or so followers from my company-issued Blackberry.
My posts were banal. I had no idea how to use Twitter at the time or how the platform would grow.
(For reasons I can’t understand, Twitter claims I joined in February 2009. Not true.)
Twitter can be trite, mean, amusing or informative. When you create an account you can curate it to your taste. Twitter is what you want it to be.
Example: I had a dear friend with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. She was part of an international network of women with the same diagnosis. They shared information about cutting-edge treatments and gave each other moral support when the weight of their disease wore them down. Twitter let these women connect and form a digital support group.
Don’t tell me - or them - that Twitter can’t be a force for good.
These ladies had no fear of censorship. But those of us with strong political opinions did. In recent years, the sensitive man-buns running the Twitter show were quick to ban content that offended the left. Even when it was true.
Especially when it was true.
Case in point: Alex Berenson. The former New York Times reporter and author of the best selling, “Pandemia,” has been banned from Twitter for months. His crime? Telling the public that the Covid vaccines didn’t prevent transmission or infection. He was absolutely right, by the way, even the CDC now agrees.
Yet Berenson is banished. I pay to follow him on Substack.
The New York Post was briefly suspended from Twitter in October 2020 for Tweeting about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those who dared express skepticism about manmade climate change were banned. So were those who pushed unconventional cures for Covid.
The Twitter action that seemed to spur Elon Musk to put an end to the petty tech tyranny was the banning of the endlessly amusing The Babylon Bee. Their crime? Tweeting this last month:
The Bee refused to delete the Tweet, insisting it was true. Rachel Levine IS a man.
Twitter refused to reinstate the account.
In other words, the twits who insist men can get pregnant have been censoring common sense and running the show at Twitter for years.
Musk has been a fan of the conservative equivalent of The Onion for years and did an interview with the writers last December.
In a recent interview Musk said he might just have to buy Twitter to get them back on the platform.
He wasn’t kidding.
Monday’s left-wing meltdown highlighted the difference between libs and conservatives on Twitter.
Those of us on the right don’t want to ban Twitter voices with which we disagree. We just want to be heard.
