Musks Free Speech Moves On Twitter Have So Far Been Unimpressive by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2022-11-22 at 01:33:59 )

Musks Free Speech Moves On Twitter Have So Far Been Unimpressive by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

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When Elon Musks purchase of Twitter was first announced this past April I said that the purchase likely would not go through if the empire thought it posed a threat to its information interests. I said that any reduction of censorship protocols which Mr. Musk implements on the platform would probably not be of the sort that make any difference to the powerful, but would instead just amplify vapid partisan culture war nonsense.

So far since Mr. Musks takeover, this does appear to be the case.

In recent days Twitter has reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, Project Veritas, Kathy Griffin, and the Babylon Bee. This to date is as close as Mr. Musk has come to honoring his stated intention of making Twitter a haven of free speech where people have a "digital town square" to debate and discuss ideas.

And it is not enough.

Un-banning a few famous people will drum up a lot of headlines and online chatter and make it look like you are really doing something, but in the end all you have done is reinstate a handful of Twitter accounts. You have not done anything to meaningfully scale back the speech restrictions on your platform.

Testing Testing Seeing if my Twitter is unblocked-ye (kanyewest) November 20, 2022

I can already hear the Elon Musk simps falling all over themselves in a mad rush to tell me it has only been a few weeks and I need to give Daddy more time, but they can go lick a Tesla battery.

Nobody gains anything by giving the billionaire the benefit of the doubt and refraining from pointing out that he has not done nearly enough at this point. The time to start criticizing and pushing is right now.

Twitter is currently full of discussions about which famous people Mr. Musk should un-ban next, but they are completely missing the point. Reinstating a handful of celebrities has no meaningful effect on the free expression of normal people.

I do not care that I can see tweets from Donald Trump and Kanye West again; I care that people are still banned from the platform for questioning western allegations of Russian war crimes and voicing unauthorized opinions about the war in Ukraine.

I care that people are still banned for questioning vaccines and Covid policies which affect everyone.

I care that media from governments the United States does not like are censored and suppressed while its reporters are made to carry "state-affiliated media" labels that media personnel from United States-aligned states do not have.

I care that mass purges of accounts are virtually always directed at people from United States-targeted nations.

Free speech is important first and foremost not because it feels nice to be able to say whatever you want, but because being able to freely criticize the powerful puts an important check on power.

Letting celebrities say whatever they want about trans people or what have you is of the "feels nice to say whatever I want" variety. We are not seeing any increase in the freedoms of speech which put a check on power.

In fact, we are seeing Mr. Musk pledge to use shadowbanning to algorithmically censor tweets with unauthorized speech.

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 will not find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.-Elon Musk (elonmusk) November 18, 2022

"New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach," Mr. Musk tweeted on Friday. "Negative-hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You will not find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet."

Musk never clarified what he means by "negative" tweets; it is as vague and subjective a definition as anyone could possibly come up with, which will surely result in abuses and overreach unless clarified.

"Freedom of speech but not freedom of reach" is the same dumbass slogan that has been used by proponents of internet censorship for a long time.

It basically means that you can say whatever you want, but if it is not approved speech then no one will ever hear it. Which of course is not free speech at all.

It is like saying "You have free speech! You can say whatever you want, as long as you say it alone in a soundproof room."

As we have discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is actually more damaging than overt censorship, because it happens in a much subtler way that people do not notice, and because it can be done at mass scale. This is the same form of censorship that has been embraced by platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which up until now have been far more restrictive of speech than Twitter.

So as far as I am concerned Mr. Musk is failing the free speech test.

Speech is not becoming any freer on Twitter in any way that actually matters, and from all appearances it is still functioning as a narrative control tool for the most powerful empire that has ever existed.

The biggest test for Elon Musk will not be whether he rolls back the most obvious "woke" content policies - that should be a given - but whether he continues to let Twitter be used as a vehicle for the United States national security state to "counter" official enemies like Russia & China-
Michael Tracey (mtracey) April 25, 2022

And that is pretty much what you would expect from a billionaire Pentagon contractor who is inextricably interwoven with the United States military-industrial complex.

People do not get to be billionaires unless they collaborate with existing power structures, and they certainly never get anywhere close to managing critical narrative control infrastructure unless they are devoutly loyal to the empire.

Billionaires only come to the rescue in movies and comic books.

Elon Musk is no more likely to save the day than Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. People only believe he is a hero because Hollywood has trained us to look for heroes, but Hollywood only does that to keep us searching for heroes outside ourselves.

We will never get a healthy world if we keep looking to billionaires, politicians and celebrities to make things better.

It is going to have to come from us.

The sooner we wake up to that reality the better a chance our species will have at surviving the existential crises looming on out horizon!!!

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Ah, the Buddha Ms Caitlin speaks the truth!!! - Cousin Lucky