Musk Twitter: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Free speech, censorship, and the extremely hardcore Twitter Files.
1. Free Speech
We know that the people who run the “Twitter Files” are genuinely committed to free speech because they are outraged when politicians of either party ask Twitter for special favors.1
That’s why the Twitter Files the New York Times reported on the extraordinary lengths Kevin McCarthy went to in using his office to lobby Twitter for a favor for Marjorie Taylor Greene:
Mr. McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Ms. Greene, even dispatching his general counsel to spend hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.
I know what you’re thinking: How is it that the intrepid independent journalists who were given an all-access pass to Twitter by the site’s owner missed this story while the failing, biased New York Times got the scoop?
I mean, it’s probably not the case that Elon Musk and his assorted remora fish and red-pilled betas are constantly working in bad faith because they don’t give a crap about either free speech, or censorship, or misinformation.
2. Editorial Bias
Meanwhile, over at Popular Information Judd Legum notes that Elon Musk’s Twitter is finally moving away from a free-speech free-for-all into being a more careful, editorially-curated platform.
Sort of.
Here’s the deal: Legum posted a Twitter thread about classroom libraries in the Manatee County School District in Florida.
Twitter did Big Tech censorship appended a “Community Note” to the post, suggesting that Legum’s tweet was misleading.
Which is the kind of editorializing that us elitists from the Cathedral love and that Musk was going to stamp out with his commitment to total free speech.
So far, so good, right? If Twitter isn’t going to ban bad actors, then we want them to tweak the platform to emphasize factual accuracy, quality, and reliability.
Yay Elon!
Except for one small problem:
Join Bulwark+ to unlock the rest
Become a paying member of The Bulwark to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
- Unlimited access to articles and newsletters including The Triad by JVL and Receipts by Catherine Rampell.
- Ad-free editions of our shows (with transcripts) and member-only shows like The Secret Podcast.
- Plus community chats and commenting features. Your support helps keep our work sustainable and available to those who cannot afford a membership. Cancel anytime.