Twitter: A Case for Tech RegulationBlockbuster #TwitterFiles revelations show the clear and present democratic danger from illiberal leftist capture of key institutions
Rod Dreher
Dec 9, 2022
Blockbuster Twitter news from Bari Weiss and her team. Starts like this:
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600Please click on that. I promise you that you will not regret it. This is extremely important information, and I'll explain why. But first, a summary. Here are the first two tweets in that long thread:
Weiss and her team have been given access to internal Twitter documents. What this new trove of documents released by Elon Musk shows is that the previous Twitter regime lied flagrantly to the public about its policies governing suppressing and censoring speech on the platform. The thread cites specific examples of how Twitter banned or shadowbanned conservative accounts while publicly denying that it was doing any such thing. Why did they do it? The internal reason was "safety". Yoel Roth was a far-left extremist who was in charge of safety for Twitter until Musk pushed him out (Roth resigned):
Roth, a gay man whose Ivy League academic work was all about gay sex (Wes Yang jokes that Roth got a Penn PhD in his own Grindr usage), queer theory, and the like, has gone public after leaving Twitter, has gone public about how he ran Twitter. Strongly recommend you watching Glenn Greenwald's show ripping Roth a new one, using Roth's own recent words from his November 29 interview with Kara Swisher (from where I took the screenshot illustrating this post). It's very, very important:
https://rumble.com/v1zeexw-the-elitist-snide-worldview-of-yoel-rothtwitters-former-censor-in-chief-wit.htmlAs Greenwald and his guest Michael Tracey show -- again, using Roth's own words -- Roth is a perfect example of the kind of left-wing elitist who runs American institutions. Tracey talks about Roth's pre-Twitter academic work which goes deep into intellectually theorizing gay hook-up apps and content -- which is to say, he was deep into the elitist academic jargonifying of sex, and gay sex in particular. The point is, this is a mindset that grows only in elite institutions -- but Roth gained the power to control the speech of millions of Americans who use the most important social media platform in the world. Greenwald (who is gay) goes on to quote the ultra-liberal Roth's contempt for ordinary Americans -- again, using Roth's own words. It's as if the editor of an Ivy League college paper gained the power to decide what could and could not appear on Twitter. Greenwald goes on to say that Roth trafficked in ideas that were standard in elite liberal discourse, but acted as if that was the objective way to understand the world -- and imposed them on Twitter.
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Towards the end, Greenwald plays a Roth clip in which he says that even criticizing transgendered people and transgenderism is dangerous. Even satire cannot be tolerated when it criticizes sacred transgenders! Greenwald says Roth is "like a Stalinist commissar" who demonstrably believes not that his opinions are debatable, but rather are "universal truths." Yes! This is the essence of the soft totalitarianism I discuss in Live Not By Lies! Nobody is going to the gulag for what they say on Twitter. But they did find themselves exiled from this platform that has become vital to our democratic public square, and crucial to the livelihoods of many people. It's not hard totalitarianism -- the gulag -- but it does have an immense impact on public and private life. This Ivy-educated commissar, Yoel Roth, was in a position at Twitter -- a private company that plays an unparalleled public role -- to control the discourse, and gag or otherwise suppress people who violated his extremely ideological model of reality (Tracey calls it a "theology"), despite Twitter publicly denying that it was doing this.
Folks, you have to understand that the David French liberal-libertarian position that private companies can do what they want to, so you don't need to worry overmuch about this, is completely untenable in the digital real world. Twitter has immense power. You might not be on Twitter, but trust me, almost everybody who makes decisions in the media is. That's why so many media leftists have raised hell about Musk's takeover of Twitter: they understand correctly how much power the platform has over shaping public discourse, and they are outraged that Elon Musk, its new owner, wants to make it more fair and balanced.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/twitter-a-case-for-tech-regulation/
