The New York Times held its fire against Elon Musk during the will-he-or-won’t-he drama over the entrepreneurial billionaire’s potential purchase of Twitter, the social media “town square” that has throttled conservative opinion in the name of squelching “hate speech” and “disinformation.”
(Never mind that such “disinformation” with time often becomes conventional wisdom, such as the once-heretical idea that cloth masks don’t stop Covid.)
But.now that Musk has officially purchased Twitter, the hysterical takes are flowing.
Shira Ovide’s “On Tech” column on the front page stamped free speech as a problem, as captured in the subhead: “New Gatekeeper, Same Issue: Balancing Freedom and Harm.” A photo caption under a picture of Musk: “Elon Musk hasn’t yet had to tackle the difficult decisions in which giving one person a voice may silence the expression of others.”
Evidently, Twitter just can’t help censoring conservatives:
A decade ago, Twitter executives, including the chief executive, Dick Costolo, declared that the social media site was the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” The stance meant Twitter would defend people’s ability to post whatever they wished and be heard by the world.
Since then, Twitter has been dragged into morasses over disinformation peddlers, governments’ abuse of social media to incite ethnic violence and threats by elected officials to imprison employees over tweets they didn’t like. Facebook, YouTube and many other internet companies. Twitter had to change from a hardliner in free speech to being a speech nanny.
….
The past 10 years have seen repeated confrontations between the high-minded principles of Silicon Valley’s founding generation of social media companies and the messy reality of a world in which “free speech” means different things to different people….
Ovide, who is a journalist who lives on free inquiry as her only source of income, offered some very tepid defences of speech.
There is almost no space on the internet that allows for absolute freedom of expression. The problem with online expression is that it’s a struggle for expression. It has many difficult questions and few easy answers. What is the best amount of speech? Who gets to make the decision?
After the Capitol Riot on January 6, she felt that kicking Donald Trump from social media was best.
…a crossing-the-Rubicon moment when the “tweets must flow” crowd acknowledged that it could and should do more to prevent people from using its internet properties to blare information that could mislead or harm others.
She finally confessed to it:
Some of the judgment calls from Twitter and its peers might have been speech-control overreach….
Former TimesNate Silver is a statistics genius. Ovide’s proclamations overconfident.
Mike Isaac and Lauren Hirsch wrote the main Musk story for Tuesday’s front page: “Musk Reaches Deal for Twitter, Pledging Fewer Limits,” which claimed with thin evidence that:
Musk has had an rocky relationship online speech. This year, he tried to quash a Twitter account that tracked his private jet, citing personal and safety reasons. His tweets have landed him in trouble with the regulators.
Kate Conger’s balanced perspective was achieved by surveying actual Twitter employees and not only the loudest leftists.
….Mr. Musk also has fans among Twitter’s rank-and-file, and some employees have welcomed his bid….other employees have argued in internal messages seen by The Times that their co-workers Have shifted to the right side of the political spectrum, making employees who support Mr. Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up….
About Post Author
