{"id":1455361,"date":"2022-04-27T11:14:40","date_gmt":"2022-04-27T15:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1455361"},"modified":"2022-04-27T11:14:44","modified_gmt":"2022-04-27T15:14:44","slug":"elon-musks-twitter-takeover-reveals-the-left-for-what-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-reveals-the-left-for-what-it-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s Twitter Takeover Reveals The Left For What It Is"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Felon-musks-twitter-takeover-reveals-the-left-for-what-it-is%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1455361&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2022\/04\/Elon-1-scaled.jpg?w=1200&#038;h=800&#038;ixlib=react-9.3.0\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p><span>This week, in one of the most shocking business moves in recent memory, Twitter reversed itself and decided to sell itself after all to Elon Musk, who paid some $44 billion for the privilege. The move was made, at least in part, for ideological reasons; Musk has been vocally critical of Twitter\u2019s management of information flow. Immediately upon the news of the buyout breaking, Musk tweeted, \u201cFree speech is the bedrock of a functional democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>All of these seem like worthwhile and anodyne goals. More speech, not less. More transparency, not less.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>And yet the political Left went utterly insane. Charles Blow of The New York Times vowed to leave the service; in fact, #LeavingTwitter trended on the service. The American Civil Liberties Union, while noting that Musk is a card-carrying member, fretted, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of danger having so much power in the hands of any one individual.\u201d Meanwhile, powerful individual with consolidated power Jeff Bezos worried over the possibility of Chinese influence on Twitter: \u201cInteresting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?\u201d Senator Elizabeth Warren called the deal \u201cdangerous for our democracy.\u201d MSNBC\u2019s Ari Melber hilariously agonized, \u201cYou could secretly ban one party\u2019s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the elections.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Yes, Ari, we know. That was the concern for tens of millions of us when social media decided to silence the Hunter Biden story, lock accounts of prominent Trump-associated officials who shared the story, and then finally threw Donald Trump off of all services simultaneously following January 6. That was one of Musk\u2019s concerns, presumably, in purchasing the service.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The Left\u2019s outsized panic over Musk\u2019s takeover is revealing for two reasons. First, it shows that the Left always understood Twitter to be a key part of its ecosystem, a Left-biased platform designed to obscure its own leanings while propagandistically pushing a particular political agenda. For years, the Left claimed that conservative concerns about Twitter bias were simple paranoia. Now, upon Musk\u2019s takeover, the Left has broken into spasms of apoplexy. That wouldn\u2019t happen if they thought Twitter wasn\u2019t their sole property.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Then there\u2019s the bigger problem: the Left despises both transparency and free speech in the political realm. The Left would prefer secret algorithms that conceal shadowbanning and bottlenecking; the Left prefers \u201cequity\u201d in speech to freedom of speech. To the Left, the potential \u201charm\u201d of allowing free speech outweighs the value in open debate. Better to ban The Babylon Bee for noting that Lia Thomas is a man than to allow such content to be passed around Twitter \u2013 and better never to let anyone know the algorithms behind such bans. After all, with transparency comes accountability. And the power is the point.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This is why Musk\u2019s first moves at Twitter must be to release information about the prior practices of Twitter \u2013 a sort of truth and reconciliation commission; to make any new algorithms far more transparent; and to fire employees who object to such practices, of whom there are many. Musk may be just the man to help restore institutional trust to social media. But that will require him to bulldoze those who helped undermine that trust in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i>The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, in one of the most shocking business moves in recent memory, Twitter reversed itself and decided to sell itself after all to Elon Musk, who paid some $44<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":1480672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1455361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1455361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1480672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1455361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1455361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1455361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}