Ben Shapiro asks if company’s new owner will be able to restore ‘institutional trust to social media’
Ben Shapiro
WND News Center
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’s management of information flow. Immediately upon the news of the buyout breaking, Musk tweeted, “Free 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.”
All of these seem like worthwhile and anodyne goals. More speech, not less. More transparency, not less.
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, “there’s a lot of danger having so much power in the hands of any one individual.” Meanwhile, powerful individual with consolidated power Jeff Bezos worried over the possibility of Chinese influence on Twitter: “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the deal “dangerous for our democracy.” MSNBC’s Ari Melber hilariously agonized, “You could secretly ban one party’s 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.”
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 to throw former President Donald Trump off of all services simultaneously following Jan. 6. That was one of Musk’s concerns, presumably, in purchasing the service.
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.
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.
Ben Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,” “The Right Side of History” and “Bullies.”
Shapiro’s claim that he sleeps on a bed of money didn’t win the argument he lost on public TV, and it doesn’t well inform him here either. His take on “the left” is just propaganda, and his claims of their intent is just baseless casting of disparaging guesswork.
Why people are worried about Musk’s buying twitter is because most Americans actually enjoy using the platform. It is very slightly moderated and for good reason. For e.g., Trump was punted for promoting insurrection against the United States–that’s you and me, our government, our people. Some people are banned for hate-speech or for threatening people or promoting violence. You may call this “free speech,” but environments full of that sort of thing never become too popular.
The worry is that if by “free speech” he means losing all moderation, twitter will just join the other utterly un-moderated platforms like 4chan where shootings and other crimes have been coordinated, and most American’s stay far away from. Twitter is popular BECAUSE it is moderated.
Think of moderation as a bar owner not letting customers shoot each other or spit on others’ tables during dinner. Would you like to frequent a bar where it was specifically okay for people to do those things?
Some Mosks in the middle East use their free speech to radicalize people, to foment love for Sharia law.
I personally don’t care one way or the other because I don’t use Twitter, but I hope it remains a trustworthy platform. I am 100% for transparency, in every respect, but I fear that if he drops moderation, he’ll kill the platform.