[Fighting for Free Speech]
[[link removed]]
[Facebook]
[[link removed]] [Twitter]
[[link removed]] [Instagram]
[[link removed]] [Youtube]
[[link removed]][Rumble]
[[link removed]]
 
Why it’s so much fun watching
Elon Musk slap Twitter in the face
[Fighting for Free Speech]
By Kevin D. Williamson
The New York Post 
Sometimes it seems that Elon Musk learned the art of public relations
from Tony Montana of “Scarface”:
“Make way for the bad guy.”
The billionaire troublemaker loves a public brawl and doesn’t mind
playing the villain, and at the moment he has Twitter all atwitter at
the prospect of his taking over the company — a $43 billion lark
that Musk seems to have undertaken in a fit of pique at the
social-media giant’s seemingly arbitrary approach to free speech and
content moderation.
[Fighting for Free Speech]
[[link removed]]
With more than 80 million followers, Musk is a very active user of
Twitter — too active at times, in the view of the SEC, which has put
him under a partial gag order as the result of ill-considered tweets
with the power to move the stock market. Musk doesn’t like the way
Twitter runs its business, so he wants to make it his business.
Twitter’s board rebuffed his solo effort to take the company over,
but Musk didn’t give up: He’s been knocking on doors on Wall
Street looking for big-money partners such as Morgan Stanley or Apollo
Global Management to back his hostile takeover. On Thursday, he said
he had secured $46.5 billion in financing.
Twitter annoyed the wrong billionaire: A social-media feud that is
also an opportunity to make a pile of money is precisely the sort of
thing Elon Musk lives for. 
Musk isn’t exactly a full-time troll: He did manage to build a major
automobile company almost from scratch, taking Tesla from three guys
with a big idea to a firm that today has a market value 20 times that
of General Motors, jump-starting the electric-vehicle market into
existence worldwide. His SpaceX company does important work for NASA
and has added some pretty cool stuff to the rocketry repertoire, such
as landing a spacecraft vertically on a boat at sea. He has some other
projects in the works — from hyperloops that could replace most
airline travel to his nonprofit artificial-intelligence work — and
he was, at the close of business on Friday, the wealthiest man in the
world.
Musk, who calls himself a “free-speech absolutist,” wants to make
Twitter a more free and open platform. What has spooked many of his
critics — especially those within the company — is not that he
plans to make the platform a moderation-free digital Wild West in
which Islamic State snuff movies are treated as though they were
brownie recipes but rather that he proposes to make public some
aspects of the company’s decision-making processes and some of its
algorithms, creating real transparency in the operations of what is
today a corporate black box.
This is likely to embarrass Twitter, whose employees exploit the
arbitrary and opaque character of its operations to pursue private
social and political vendettas, e.g. trying to suppress the New York
Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s shenanigans (which you can now
read about, years after the fact, in the New York Times and the
Washington Post) before the 2020 election, when they would have
embarrassed Joe Biden and possibly helped Donald Trump. I wrote the
case against Trump — literally: My book, “The Case Against
Trump,” was published in 2016 — but it is very difficult even for
me to imagine a plausible rationale for denying Donald Trump a Twitter
account while the Taliban has free access to the platform. Twitter’s
only reliable free-speech principle is that it shuns anything that
causes California progressives to run around shrieking with their
dresses over their heads.
What Musk proposes is not taking away Twitter’s ability to regulate
content on its platform but rather to disinfect that process by
dragging Twitter’s inner workings out of the shadows and into the
sunshine.
There is plenty to criticize about Twitter, which is the vast open
sewer of our public life. And there is plenty to criticize about Elon
Musk, too. I do not think that Musk is likely to make Twitter any
worse than it already is, because I do not think that is possible: The
basic architecture of Twitter — anonymity, immediacy, the way a
following is built — ensures that Twitter brings out the worst in
its users. Twitter rewards hysteria, performative outrage, and
tribalism, and has very little use for thoughtfulness, nuance, or
consensus-building. A good version of Twitter simply would not be
Twitter.
Watching Elon Musk take on Twitter is like watching a hockey game or
sitting through the Oscars: The beatdown will be the fun part, no
matter who wins.
_[Contribute ]
[[link removed]]_
_ACT for America Education, a 501(c)(3) organization.
All donations are tax-deductible._
869 Lynnhaven Pkwy, 113 #411
Virginia Beach, VA 23452
Charity Navigator
[[link removed]] | Unsubscribe
[[link removed]]
Copyright 2021 ACT for America. All Rights Reserved.
[Facebook]
[[link removed]] [Twitter]
[[link removed]] [Instagram]
[[link removed]] [Youtube]
[[link removed]][Rumble]
[[link removed]]