Facebook’s partisan electoral Death Star, to paraphrase Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, is fully funded and operational. But over at ‘X’ (still pronounced “Twitter”), they are showing more signs that they are serious about defending free speech.
Yes, I’ve heard stories about how X is not living up to their promise, but things have gotten X-ponentially better, and this can’t hurt their pro-free-speech image makeover.
Oh you mean the “Election Integrity” Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 27, 2023
Half gone. What are the other half up to, and how many are there? And, more importantly, are they there to add context to both sides, especially the plethora of left-Wing Election lies?
I’ve no issue with some stooge adding context or their interpretation of it to anything. That’s what a blog’s user comments section does. The other thing it does is create movement. Once you publish something, it typically has a shelf life, especially in the internet age. One day is an eternity. Yes, you can always revisit whatever it is for context, but when someone adds on, you’ve resuscitated it. Given not just readers but the author the option of kicking that can again and again.
Perhaps it gets picked up nationally and goes wide, and now all sorts of people with every manner of opinion can pig pile on, providing more context. Partisans, self-proclaimed non-partisans, experts, ignoramuses, rapscallions, scallywags, miscreants, and scoundrels. Everything an open internet has to offer, good or bad.
That’s free speech.
If you can remain civil and refrain from too many “colorful metaphors,” a wealth of information can unravel alongside the garbage, all of which we, as free-thinking individuals, are meant to sift for value—the free market of ideas.
Twitter of Eld was inclined to add context, but they’d often shadowban you or, without preamble, shutter your account. Dissenters griping about X’s slow progress need to remember that. Twitter was (much like America today) a toxic progressive “superfund site” in need of profound cultural and political environmental cleanup. That’s not something you do in a day, a week, or even a year. And it’ll never be what you’d like, no matter what you think that might be, but it will still be Twitter, no matter what we’re supposed to call it.
And this latest move strikes me as another step in the right direction.
