When Elon Musk made his offer in April to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, which amounts to $43 billion, many were thrilled, including myself. While there is much wrong with social media, it has become a sort of townhall allowing for important discussions, connections, and information. That is, until leftists took control making it a platform that was promoting and pushing one way of thinking while censoring those who dared to not conform.
After Musk’s initial effort, he attempted to terminate the deal when, he argued, Twitter refused to be transparent about the number of fake and bot accounts on the platform. Twitter sued, but now Musk has reversed course, offering the same deal, and the judge has postposed the trial until October 28 to allow the parties to work out the deal to acquire the company.
Two of the most famous acts of Twitter political interference involve President Trump being banned, and the platform infamously censoring the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story and suspending the newspaper’s account in the process. However, multiple conservatives have also been banned or suspended. The throttling of conservative’s tweets, limiting the reach of articles for various conservative news outlets, among other censorship efforts, have been a mainstay for the Twitter bureaucracy.
Now, with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook confirming that they censored the Hunter Biden story due to FBI outreach, we are getting a more complete picture of the Biden administration’s role in what some say is collusion with Big Tech to censor conservatives by proxy.
The left’s reaction to the Musk takeover looking even more likely, confirms that they have relied on Twitter to control the public conversation that influenced the outcome of elections. “Get ready for Elon Musk to turn Twitter into a right-wing cesspool that could hand Trump 2024” blares a frantic Vanity Fair headline. NBC News reporter Ben Collins had his own meltdown on Twitter saying the quiet thing out loud about the political impact: “For those of you asking: Yes, I do think this site can and will change pretty dramatically if Musk gets full control over it. No, there is no immediate replacement. If it gets done early enough, based on the people he’s aligned with, yes, it could actually affect midterms.”
Fox News reported on the open discussion amongst liberal media on Twitter about how right Collins was and how much things would change: “NPR editor Neela Banerjee retweeted the thread writing, ‘As usual, Ben Collins provides a useful thread on the broader implications for the rest of us of a Musk takeover of Twitter.’ Others also agreed with Collins on the risk posed by Musk purchasing Twitter, ‘Be afraid, be actually afraid,’ former Politico Magazine editor Garrett M. Graff wrote.”
By revealing sentiments from people who justified the banning of Trump and so many others in the name of “saving democracy” and stopping “election interference,” they openly admit that current liberal management losing control of Twitter would impact elections. This reveals that their control has done just that.
There are a few things that could happen if in fact this deal comes to completion. For many people the most exciting of which is a return of former President Donald Trump to the platform. Musk said he thinks the suspension of Trump was wrong and that permanent bans should be rare. Earlier this year Trump said he would not go back to Twitter and would stay exclusively with his Truth Social platform. One could argue, however, it’s in his best interest to have his voice everywhere considering the left continues to smear him and his family, and relies on being able to limit his ability to be heard.
In the meantime, Musk’s tweets announcing his renewed intention to buy Twitter allude to something much bigger is in the works. The day after his announcement he tweeted, “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” The New York Times reported on Musk’s previous complimentary remarks about WeChat, a platform owned by a Chinese technology giant. “’In China, WeChat is used by more than a billion people as an all-in-one social media, instant messaging and mobile payment app. Used to order food, hail cabs and find news, it is sewn into the fabric of daily life.’ Mr. Musk has said that if a similar app were used by enough people worldwide to communicate, it could establish a payment system as well. ‘I think such an app would be really useful. And just the utility of sort of a spam-free thing where you could make comments, you could post videos — I think it’s important for content creators to have a revenue share,’ Mr. Musk said on a podcast in May,” reported the Times.
Ironically, it’s Twitter that has shown us the danger of important aspects of our lives being under the control of bureaucrats and Big Tech. When partisans control aspects of our lives it reminds us that becoming exclusively reliant on one internet platform could be very dangerous for our freedom and even our national security. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it could only work if a platform is in the hands of someone known for their commitment to free speech and understands the cancer of the progressive “woke” machine threatening our freedom in general.
Musk is that person, and there will always be risks in this technological age, it’s certainly not going away. We cannot surrender the technology front to the scourge of the left. We must engage to ensure the threat of progressive and wokeist control of government and technology is crushed while reinforcing the American commitment to genuine personal freedom.