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NOVEMBER 1, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
**Fellow Journalists (and Our Academic Friends), It's Time to Leave
Twitter**
Well, provided some of the sacked Twitterati and alternative funders
establish a non-Elonized forum.
A question for my peers: Do you really want to discourse on a medium
owned and operated by Elon Musk?
I acknowledge at the outset that this is a lot easier for me to say than
it is for you, as I seldom use social media. I tweet rarely and only
when I think I have a one-liner I want to share. My last tweet linked to
a
**New York Times**story about the discovery of the remains of an entire
Neanderthal family in some Russian cave, to which I added, "And Putin
drafted the males and sent them to Ukraine." I have the luxury of having
other forums, like this one, on which to unload my opinions and I
readily concede that many of you don't, that many of you have been
told by your publishers and editors that your job includes sharing
content on social media, that many of you like both to share and read
what other thoughtful (and sometimes thoughtless) folks have been
tweeting, that many of you have completely internalized these practices
and have trouble imagining life without them. I also acknowledge my
general geezerhood, which enables me to remember what life was like
before social media and has doubtless made me more resistant to its
charms.
All that acknowledged, we who rail at the effects of Rupert Murdoch's
investment in neofascist propaganda have reason to be concerned about
the far richer Elon Musk's investment in damn near everything. A
private citizen who could cut off Ukraine's means of communication
clearly has too much power, just as a private citizen who could flood
America in still more hate speech does as well. Like the Hitler-friendly
Henry Ford, Musk made his fortune in cars, and while there's nothing
as systematic in his apparent beliefs as Ford's antisemitism, there is
a kind of knee-jerk nihilistic rejection of the notion of social
responsibility and a laissez-faire indifference to (and, with his Paul
Pelosi tweet, personal embrace of) viciously bigoted Trumpian,
Putinesque neofascist outbursts and the violence that increasingly
accompanies them, so long as he can classify them as just bad-boy
excesses.
We are awash, however, in viciously bigoted neofascist outbursts, and
far from declining to give them wider distribution, Musk wants to let
'em rip. We don't have to participate in such a venture. We need an
alternative and we need to take a walk from his.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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