MRC Frets Again That Musk Hasn’t Made Twitter/X Right-Wing Enough

The Media Research Center is nearly all about serving as Elon Musk’s press agent — and when it does criticize him, it’s usually because he hasn’t pushed Twitter/X far enough to the right. It published a Feb. 25 column by Larry Elder in the wake of media kerfuffles about how President Biden’s purported mental fitness issues, praising Musk while still playing victim:

This elevates the importance of outlets like the Elon Musk-owned X, formerly known as Twitter. Musk uncovered the extent to which Twitter suppressed posts of conservatives, suppressed posts questioning the then-conventional wisdom of the COVID vaccine, masking and shutdowns, and even briefly shut down the New York Post‘s account for its reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story.

When Musk bought Twitter, things changed immediately. Conservatives saw a quick and substantial uptick in followers. But, since then, many conservatives say they experience pre-Musk sluggish growth. So, I recently posted on X the following:

“Dear @elonmusk,

“I can’t be the only one? I believe conservatives are STILL being suppressed — and that new followers are only painstakingly added — because of the anti-conservative, anti-Trump hostility of your deep state Twitter employees. This is a shout out to other conservatives/libertarians on your platform, please tell me if you’ve ALSO experienced the same sluggish growth in new followers, a stark contrast from what happened when Musk first took over when I — and many other conservatives — had an explosion of new followers. Please comment!”

Elder doesn’t appear to consider the possibility that his right-wing politics have a ceiling — that there’s only so many followers he will attract, so after that initial publicity-driven surge, he wouldn’t get many more. (Elder’s failed presidential campaign also suggest there’s a limit to his appeal.) Nevertheless, Elder had to keep the conspiracy theory alive: “Bottom line, Mr. Musk, a lot of conservatives still detect a serious deep state problem at X, a platform we need now more than ever.”

A March 1 post by Gabriela Pariseau whined that Twitter is apparently not letting right-wingers hate transgender people enough with their obsession with misgendering them:

Elon Musk appears to have resurrected Twitter’s infamous policy of censoring those who refuse to use a person’s preferred pronouns. What’s worse is that he is now trying to defend it.

In January, X (formerly Twitter) quietly changed its “Abuse and Harassment” policy to state that the platform “will reduce the visibility of posts that purposefully use different pronouns to address someone other than what that person uses for themselves, or that use a previous name that someone no longer goes by as part of their transition.” The changes echo the old Twitter regime’s deadnaming and misgendering policy. But the difference between the old gender pronoun policies and the new one is that X spun the latter with sanitized language and included a slightly lighter penalty. But censorship by another name still stinks to high heaven. 

The platform’s revised policy is ripe for abuse as X claims it will rely on the subjective opinions of transgender users to determine whether or not they have been harassed. “Given the complexity of determining whether such a violation has occurred, we must always hear from the target to determine if a violation has occurred,” the X policy reads.

Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik called Musk out on his platform’s censorship backsliding in an X post. “Apparently X might’ve reinstated their ‘misgendering’ rule so I gotta test it out…,” she wrote. Raichik proceeded to bluntly refer to a number of high-profile transgenders by their biological sex to test how heavy-handed X’s new policy would be: “Richard Levine is male. He is a man. Dylan Mulvaney is male. He is a man. Ellen Page is female. She is a woman. If I get suspended you can find me at @libsoftiktok.” She continued: “In all seriousness @elonmusk can you please clarify this? Why the change?”

Musk responded by weakly defending the policy. “This is just about repeated, targeted harassment of a particular person,” he retorted. Musk’s response fails to recognize that the new policy makes X the referee between transgender users who may arbitrarily claim harassment and non-compliant users who refuse to bend the knee to leftist activists and lie about a person’s sex and self-appointed pronouns. 

Raichik, of course, is a vicious transphobe, so her guidance isn’t exactly helpful or constructive — she’s just demanding a license to hate. She wants to harass transgender people — that’s what she gets paid to do. Sdtill, Pariseau uncritically regurgitated her whining:

Raichik pointed out this exact problem and the resulting unequal treatment. “Using the correct sex based pronouns for someone is ‘harassment’? We’re being forced to lie?” she asked. “What about harassment in general? There are accounts who repeatedly target and harass specific individuals in an obsessive way. What constitutes ‘repeated’ and ‘targeted’ and why do only one group of people get this special treatment?” 

Musk tried to reassure Raichik: “You’re not going to get suspended.” But Racihik dismissed Musk’s assurances as just empty talk: “Yeah just shadowbanned and less tweet visibility.” 

Inciting violent threats probably constitutes “repeated” and “targeted” harassment, but Raichik will play dumb about her true agenda and Pariseau will refuse to tell her readers that’s what she does. Instead, she whined that Musk has apparently flip-flopped:

Musk appears to have a pattern of flip-flopping on this particular issue. Last April, Twitter took deadnaming and misgendering out of its “Hateful Conduct” policy after MRC called the platform out for a massive spike in censorship related to transgender-related posts. In June, despite the change, X pulled out of a deal with The Daily Wire after it had previously agreed to promote the What Is a Woman documentary reportedly due to “misgendering” in the film.

[…]

It seems X is returning to Musk’s preferences as opposed to trying to mirror the law as he has continuously claimed. 

Pariseau doesn’t explain why her fellow right-wingers are so obsessed with disrepecting the existence of transgender people, or why they think it’s their business what other people call themselves. Last year, the MRC and its fellow transphobes had successfully pressured Musk into permitting misgendering and deadnaming on Twitter/X.