One of the most amusing categories of incident during Twitter's long reign as a tool of propaganda for the regime was the slow but steady stream of academic "studies" that "proved" Twitter did not "discriminate" against the right.
Just as many---maybe even more!---left winger users were shadow banned, throttled, muted, or canceled as right wingers, and search results were juiced just as much in favor of the right as of the left, these great brains new-research-showed us.
You have to wonder how those academics, who can discover anything you need discovering, feel about their past discoveries now. For if it was true the left was censored as much as the right, then the left wouldn't be having the tearful frenzied rage-filled fits of apoplexy they are enjoying at the thought of lost souls being let back on Twitter.
Right?
Wrong:
It's also of interest to note the effeminate adore metaphors like "toxicity and health" and "safety" to describe their fears. Their terror of even minor physical inconvenience explains much of the last two and half years of panic.
Anyway, Elon Musk got his bid accepted. What exactly it will mean in day-to-day Twitter is anybody's guess. Will he really reactivate dissident accounts? Purge bots? Verify all who are willing to expose themselves? Who knows?
Key, though, are his calls for "free speech". Say "free speech" to the woke and they develop a raging case of the hebbie jebbies. We needn't debate the limits of that term: it's enough to know the regime realizes that if they don't control all major organs of propaganda, it's as if they own none of them.
As Jacques Ellul says in his magnificent study Propaganda,
Propaganda must be total. The propagandists must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal---the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all these media. There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in sporadic fashion and and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings or lectures, writes a few slogans on walls: that is not propaganda.
Leave room for a man to think free, and the truth has a wedge. That's why Twitter "health and safety" boards worked so assiduously to slay serious---and hilarious---critics of the regime.
Musk, it seems, promises to end these practices. Will he get away with it? Mark Zuckerberg didn't. He, too, he said, wanted fewer posting rules. But the regime, and his employees, wanted more. And got them.
Musk surely has a stronger soul than Zuckerberg. He must have, because he was able to wrest Twitter from the regime. That shows the steel of this resolve, but also the weakness of our bumbling regime, which if it were able would have been able to stop Musk.
As inept as they are, they at least realize they are in trouble, which accounts for this:
"Reforming Section 230 and enacting anti-trust reforms," is a vague threat, but it's still a threat. Twitter is no way a monopoly. As competitors, there's Gab, Parler, Minds, Truth Social and so on. But that's in real life. What the regime can legally define as a monopoly could be quite different.
Here's what the regime's chief propagandist mouthpiece had in mind about accountability. NYT headline: "The surgeon general calls on Big Tech to turn over Covid-19 misinformation data." With subheadline "Dr. Vivek Murthy also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation. Companies have until May 2 to submit the data."
Did you laugh when you read "Dr", too? Never mind. Here's how the NYT propaganda opens:
President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday formally requested that the major tech platforms submit information about the scale of Covid-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems.
A request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How many times have you read that officially defining "misinformation" necessarily requires a Ministry of Truth? Well, you just read it again. Here you see it forming.
Again, for propaganda to work, it has to be total. The left and woke control all major organizations, from Kindergarten on up. But they might not be able to maintain their grip on Twitter.
The regime remembers the Meme Wars of 2016. They saw what allowing dissidents a voice leads to. They hated it: they hate it still. Is our regime still of sufficient strength to crush Musk at last (assuming Musk means what he says)? Of is the regime fading in vigor like Biden's hair plugs?
I'm fifty-fifty on this.
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I'm 50-50 on Musk as a whole.
There are some indications Musk may not be as self-made, independent, or "good" as he might appear at first glance. There are DOD connections with starlink, and Musk was, at a minimum, most certainly a beneficiary of Obama green energy deals. I find his technocratic vision (and the fundamental assumptions about humanity on which those are based) to be downright frightening and dystopian, such as the neurolink project. Details of his personal life leave the impression he is a moral reprobate who is attracted to darkness. He is a WEF young global leader. All of this to say, there seems to be a lot more to Musk than meets the eye, and there is something about his rise and the character and origins of many of his projects that seem unnatural and inorganic - in the sense that many of the ideas seem to originate from a silent but very well funded, independent, and preexisting R&D enterprise, benefit from shadowy funding and behind the scenes regulatory string-pulling, and market manipulation (the market value of Tesla is indefensible). These are just impressions, not well researched, and could be wrong. But they are also based on impressions from actual events and news stories (thus not entirely made up), and I am comfortable they are also not based on envy or desire to denigrate his success. Instead, I just can't shake this intuitive-sense there is a silent helper that influences the general market conditions in many ways that ensures Musk products are wildly successful. Perhaps its as simple as Musk having a keen eye for going after industries that he knows the government is motivated to have succeed (such as green energy), but the meteoric rise in his net worth during lockdowns defies logic. Amazon / Bezos made sense, but Tesla?
Anyway, with all that in mind, I view the Twitter take-over with suspicion. There are some signs this could be a type of controlled opposition (he didn't simply reach into his pocket and pull out $50 billion - it was a leveraged buyout) or trojan horse (Twitter got so out of hand and had become so blatant with its various misdeeds that I started to wonder if it was merely a sign of world-class hubris, or a purposefully executed "problem" proliferating in plain sight so that the right would openly welcome a solution that involves a digital ID, because that appears to be part of the solution. Musk has plainly stated in recent Tweets that he plans to eliminate all bots and "authenticate all humans" (his term, not mine). What else could that be except for digital ID.)