Non-right-wingers are fleeing Twitter/X — and the Media Research Center isn’t happy about it. Jorge Bonilla huffed in a Nov. 15 post:
In what could best be described as a naked piece of Regime propaganda, NBC News promoted the left’s latest temper tantrum-induced exodus from X (formerly Twitter). And in so doing, they left out the part about the left’s temper tantrum.
[…]The report spends its first minute trying to pin departures on X on an AI-related change in its terms of service. It bears noting that most of these announcements were aired on TikTok, and should perhaps therefore be taken with a brick of salt.
After laying that predicate, and as a “by the way”, the report gets to its point, which is to cast X (and, by extension, Elon Musk) as a right-wing depository of disinformation. No mention was made of the leftist celebrities, propagandists such as Joy Reid, and media outlets such as The Guardian that departed the global town square once it became clear that they lost ideological supremacy., aided and abetted by weaponized government and the censorship industrial complex.
THIS is the real factual basis that undergirds NBC’s propagandistic report, intended to encourage further departures away from X. The loss of political influence, framed within an AI panic. Further proof evident that the media landscape has shifted, and will never again be the same.
Funny, we don’t recall the MRC claiming that right-wingers were having a “tantrum” when they quit pre-Musk Twitter for right-wing safe spaces like Parler and Truth Social. Bonilla’s reference to “weaponized government and the censorship industrial complex” is actually just a newly worded summary of the MRC’s ongoing tantrum about insisting on branding attempts to correct lies and misinformation as “censorship.” Also note that Bonilla handwaves the “AI-related change” issue without explaining what the deal is; it’s buried in the transcript that, in the words of a reporter, X in changing its terms of service to “explicitly state by using X, you are agreeing to let your posts be used to train AI, with seemingly no way to opt out.” That seems like an issue, but Bonilla doesn’t want to discuss it; instead, he closed by gushing, “Perhaps Elon’s right: X is the media.”
Clay Waters took a similar tone in a Nov. 19 post:
For years, New York Times reporters used their “reporting” to encourage social media companies to drive conservatives off of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook through blacklisting, censorship, hysterical fearmongering over what liberals consider “misinformation,” even attempts to eavesdrop on suspected gatherings of wrong-think.
“Journalist” Taylor Lorenz in particular longed to play social media hall monitor, lamenting in February 2021 that one couldn’t listen in on private conversations taking place within online apps like Clubhouse [remember Clubhouse?]. Now, with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) and Trump’s Truth Social, one of those would be monitors, San Francisco-based reporter Sheera Frenkel, whined that the left has no safe sandbox left to play in.
Check out this headline deck: “Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right– If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was the ascendancy of social platforms for the right. That puts Democrats at a disadvantage.”
Do violins come that small?
Neither Bonilla nor Waters mentioned the fact that Musk used Twitter/X to engage in the censorship and election interference it used to hate, let alone explain why he gets a pass and the other social media outlets don’t.
Catherine Salgado used a Nov. 21 post to take a shot at Bluesky because it actually does content moderation:
Amid the furor over the 2024 election, many leftists abandoned pro-free speech X for a social media alternative, and the results are stunning.
Platform Bluesky is attempting to cater to its most anti-free speech users, claiming it will increase censorship to “max capacity,” but apparently it can’t crush speech fast enough to satisfy its user base. Many leftists, especially after the 2024 election turned into a landslide victory for Republicans, lashed out at President-elect Donald Trump’s ally and X owner Elon Musk, leaving X behind.
Many chose to create accounts on Bluesky instead, and the platform soon announced that its censors couldn’t handle the deluge of censorship demands, though it plans to keep trying. The platform even encouraged users to report content for censorship.
[…]There is “increased spam, scam, and trolling activity” on the platform, Bluesky Safety asserted, urging anti-speech users to “help us by reporting them by clicking the three-dot menu on each post/account.” Bluesky Safety concluded by promising increased censorship, “We appreciate your patience as we dial our moderation team up to max capacity and bring on new team members to support this load.” But when users are determined to be offended and demand censorship, they won’t stop even after moving to a more restricted platform.
But these writers are silent about the fact that all this whining is coming about because right-wingers are mad because there are fewer liberals to beat up on at X these days, as as Daily Kos’ Oliver Willis explains:
Bluesky has said they value community over harassment and have put in tools and functions that—while flawed—are more in line with the tools available on Twitter before Musk took over. So if the “libs” move somewhere else, like Bluesky, there aren’t any liberals to own.
Without liberals to dogpile on and demonstrate their dominance, conservatives have to tolerate their own company. This is the problem that has faced other conservative social media networks in the past, including Parler and Trump’s own Truth Social. Parler was more useful as a tool to organize terroristic attacks than as a traditional social media network for this reason.
It turns out that these people need the liberals they hate so much to give meaning to their (apparently) sad online lives.
[…]Not having the libs to own, after making the behavior such a big part of their lives, has created a vacuum for the right. In that way, the libs have now owned them.
And the MRC whining continues: A Dec. 3 post by Waters grumbled about a New York Times story headlined “Journalists are finding more readers and less hate on Bluesky than on the platform they used to know as Twitter,” to which he huffily added: “As long as you follow the liberal line, that is.” He went on to insist that “Twitter is actually becoming politically balanced, now that Musk has taken over and conservatives have stopped being shadow-banned or actually banned from the platform, while liberals annoyed with losing their privileges abscond to the Bluesky echo chamber” — but he seems perfectly happy with Musk turning X into a right-wing echo chamber where liberals are not welcome.