They Have No Remorse

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, October 31, 2022

 

Should the Left be so afraid of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter? Many certainly are afraid. Twitter is a relatively small social-media service, but it is the playpen of the mainstream media. It’s where journalists and other media figures go to discover the conventional wisdom, and to participate in its creation. The New York Times carried no fewer than five alarmed articles about the purchase on its homepage last Thursday.

 

A Democratic strategist told Politico that the change of ownership is “an earthquake,” and that Musk may allow Donald Trump back on to “spread any lies he wants about the election, voting machines, etc.” Does no one remember the week in 2020 where liberals were taking photos of postal trucks and boxes and spreading the rumor that Donald Trump was stealing the election via the Postal Service?

 

Another progressive social-media-watchdog functionary told Politico that Musk’s removal of Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s policy chief, is a “long-term catastrophe.” Why? Because she’s the one making the decisions on what you can and can’t say on Twitter. She’s “the moral compass and clear-eyed leader,” according to Jesse Lehrich of Accountable Tech. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D., of course) of the House Energy and Commerce panel promised that, “I will be watching to see if the company maintains its commitment to promote healthy dialogue, free from disinformation and harassment.”

 

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an entire news story with this headline: “Elon Musk, in a Tweet, Shares Link From Site Known to Publish False News.”

 

The lack of self-awareness is astonishing. The New York Times is also known to publish false news. Just look at the way it overhyped juvenile Covid by conflating it with RSV, or the way one of its lead Covid reporters treated the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins as nothing other than a racist conspiracy theory. We’ve caught the Times publishing urban legends when they conform to the Times’ biases, and then the Times began amending the article secretly as it got challenged, rather than appending real corrections.

 

Ever since 2017, we have been living in an era of progressive superintendence over social media. This new era of moderation and censorship of social media was pitched explicitly as the remedy for Brexit and Donald Trump — as if everyone who supported these things had fallen for a dirty trick.

 

This era began with BuzzFeed’s then-leader Ben Smith beating his chest about how reporters in the Trump era would have to be on guard for fake news and disinformation and challenge it. A few weeks later, he made the decision to publish fake news, loaded with foreign-sourced disinformation — the Trump dossier.

 

The Covid pandemic showed how it worked. It was always reasonable to speculate that Covid-19, which emerged in Wuhan, may have had some relationship to the one lab in China that was studying bat coronaviruses and had a history of poor safety practices. But, using Donald Trump’s speculations as a springboard, self-interested technocrats were able to sway the preponderance of liberal opinion. When liberal opinion generally converged on the idea that it was a conspiracy theory, suddenly, social-media sites such as Facebook began memory-holing posts on the lab leak.

 

There’s never once been an apology for any of this. Not on the dossier. Not on Covid’s origins. Not on the debates about cloth masks. Not about school closings. Not about the gaslighting over the “mostly peaceful protests” in 2020. None of it.

 

Progressives at tech watchdogs, or those working on Democratic campaigns or throughout the media, do not regret anything about the censorship of social media. They understand it is a source of power – and they are correct to do so. In fact, the obvious lies tend to magnify their power. You can’t prove you have power over the menu unless you occasionally serve up something everyone recognizes is rotten and yet you still force people to eat it. If the common opinion among non-expert but clubbable journalists can move the richest companies in America to begin censoring other Americans, who cares if the censorship has any relation to truth or falsity? The persuasiveness is the demonstration of the power itself. Everyone at the New York Times still has their job if they stayed on the side of that power.

 

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a long-term disaster to these people because it reminds them that sometimes, accountability can exist. Sometimes, your network of popular friends can’t save you.