First of all I need to point out a rather delicious irony. In large part, the Musk takeover of Twitter was accomplished with money provided him by Tesla buyers.
That said, let’s look closely at something coming off the Heartland Daily News:
The Left’s outsized panic over Musk’s 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’s takeover, the Left has broken into spasms of apoplexy. That wouldn’t happen if they thought Twitter wasn’t their sole property.
Indeed, and as I suggested yesterday, they know that when they don’t have sole control over the narrative, they lose. Which in turn is precisely why the left is losing what was left of their functioning minds over this.
But the article goes on to very correctly explain what’s needed to be done to seal this deal:
Then there’s the bigger problem: the Left despises both transparency and free speech in the political realm. The Left would prefer secret algorithms that conceal “shadow-banning” and bottlenecking; the Left prefers “equity” in speech to freedom of speech. To the Left, the potential “harm” of allowing free speech outweighs the value in open debate. Better to ban The Babylon Bee for stating that Lia Thomas is a man than to allow such content to be passed around Twitter—and better never to let anyone know the algorithms behind such bans. After all, with transparency comes accountability. And the power is the point.
This is why Musk’s first moves at Twitter must be to release information about the prior practices of Twitter—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.
Agreed… there is going to be a lack of trust with Twitter going forward until such time as they come clean about such matters. Representative Josh Hawley agrees, saying in part: [1]
“In recent years, Twitter has intervened in American discourse with an increasingly heavy hand, attempting to shape the information environment for overtly partisan reasons,” Hawley wrote. “Algorithms didn’t make those calls; employees did. And at this point, the American people deserve to know the truth about what went on at Twitter for years behind closed doors.”
If Musk is as smart as I think he is, he will do as suggested here.