The Media Research Center has done its best to bury the debacle that is Elon Musk’s plan to deprecate Twitter’s blue-check symbol from official assurance that an account is authentic to a meaningless dot that proves only that the user is enough of a sucker to pay Musk $8 a month to have one. When a tiny fraction of people actually bought the blue checks — understanding the ruse — Musk arbitrarily slapped the blue check on accounts that didn’t even pay for it, including celebrities (even dead ones). (Meanwhile, Twitter awarded a gold verification badge, which reportedly costs $1,000 a month, to a fake account purporting to represent the children’s channel Disney Junior.)
But the MRC would rather you not talk about any of this. Instead, it’s doing Musk PR by raging at the hated George Soros for buying a blue check (even though it shows he’s a smart businessman by refusing to pay for something that offers nothing of value in return). An April 24 post by Clay Waters was another PR piece that lashed out at a report that pointed out how Musk had rendered the blue check meaningless:
A double panic attack took place on Friday’s edition of the talk show Amanpour & Co, which co-airs on CNN and PBS, over Twitter chief Elon Musk no longer handing out account verifications (i.e. “blue checks”) to liberal journalists willy-nilly, but instead giving them to anyone willing to pay the fee.
Liberal journalists like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman have developed a complex over blue checkmarks, with Musk himself seeming to enjoy toying with their fragile self-regard online.
Musk’s move apparently threatens an onslaught of “disinformation.” Amanpour fill-in host Bianna Golodryga’s overwrought fears were on display in her introduction:
Waters then tried to fame former Twitter executive Vivian Schiller pointing out that the blue check means nothing as a complaint coming only from “liberal elites”:
Liberal elites are impressed by their blue-check status, suggesting concerns about “misinformation” are window-dressing over their real concern, that the hoi polloi can now pay $8 a month for the mark of prestige previously reserved for themselves, although Schiller defensively denied such thinking:
When it was pointed out that Musk is rolling back anti-hate policies such as dropping punishments fordeliberately misgendering transgender people, Waters tried to play the victim card:
The liberal whining began in earnest, with Golodryga asking Schiller about Twitter “quietly rolling back some of its protections, specifically for transgender people,” including “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
Schiller: ….the policy specifically called out transgender individuals who we already know are subject to a lot of abuse online. And by removing that line and keeping it broadly, targeting of others, it removes tha added protection…
Conservatives get smeared and cursed and throttled on Twitter thousands of times a day, often by radical transgender activists. Yet it’s transgenders who require “added protection” from being called by their birth names?
Waters appears not to have considered the possibility that he and his fellow right-wingers could simply stop obsessively hating transgender, and he didn’t explain why right-wingers must misgender people.
Luis Cornelio turned a Twitter user’s confusion about the proliferation of various colored check marks for Twitter users (he thought the blue check for President Biden’s account had been dropped; instead, it had been changed to a newly invented gray check given to accounts of government officials)into an April 25 post which cheered right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro ranting about it, then tried to relitigate Donald Trump’s social media suspensions:
Shapiro’s slap-down response to Dobrofsky’s tweet made reference to Big Tech’s censorship efforts to ban then-President Trump from all major social media platforms amid the January 6 Capitol riot.
At the time, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Chinese communist-tied TikTok and even Shopify participated in the coordinated effort to ban a sitting president. Digital store Shopify went as far as to block stores that sell Trump-related content.
[…]According to an MRC Free Speech America study, the same Big Tech companies that banned Trump allowed seven dictators, including embattled Russian President Vladimir Putin, to post government propaganda, reaching approximately 50 million followers.
Cornelio omitted the fact that Trump was credibly accused of inciting the Capitol riot through his false claims of election fraud. He also didn’t mention that his fellow right-wingers like Putin’s policies, particularly his similar hatred of LGBT people.