The bad news continued to come for Elon Musk’s Twitter:
- Musk threatened to censor users who use the word “cisgender,” inexplicably insisting that it’s a “slur.”
- He tried to make Twitter less accessible by introducing new limits on tweet views for anyone who won’t pay the billionaire $8 a month, and many users had problems accessing Twitter at all.
- Twitter’s attempt to mimic TikTok’s “swipe up” feature is showing viewers graphic and conspiracy-theory-laden videos featuring gun violence, police brutality, physical altercations and vaccine misinformation.
The Media Research Center will tell its viewers about none of this, of course — Musk’s de facto PR operation would never do that. Instead, it was all about Musk-fluffing. A June 19 post by Gabriela Pariseau hyped an interview he did with an obscure podcaster in which he did his usual pontifications about “free speech.” We suspect the podcaster lobbed only easy softballs as Musk. A June 28 tweet on the NewsBusters Twitter account obsequiously wished Musk a happy birthday.
Peter Kotara insisted that anti-Semitism and other hate on Twitter is not hate speech but “so-called hate speech” in a June 28 post raging that people want Musk to do something about it, starting with issuing a personal attack on the head of the Anti-Defamation League:
On Wednesday’s Morning Joe, ADL Vice President Yael Eisenstat joined MSNBC hosts Willie Geist and Jonathan Lemire to demand social media companies tighten the noose of political censorship online, cry about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and even call for the government to become involved in online censorship.
Eisenstat, a far left censorship proponent, appeared on the segment to push forward the thesis that so-called “hate speech” has been increasing online, and that social media companies needed to censor it, as well as that the government needed to pass legislation forcing them crack down on it if they won’t do so on their own.
[…]So, who is Yael Eisenstat? Apart from being the Vice President of the ADL, a partisan organization dedicated to demonizing right-wingers and labeling them “anti-semites” based solely on their opposition to woke ideology, she was a former Facebook employee, CIA analyst, and National Security Adviser to then Vice President Joe Biden.
According to Influence Watch, Eisenstat “argued that speech she considers to be misinformation or hateful that does not violate any laws should still be subjected to censorship.” Here Eisenstat showed her true malevolent nature, that she wished to destroy any political speech she disagreed with by classifying it as “hate speech”.
Kotara didn’t explain why anti-Semitism shouldn’t be considered hate speech, nor did he cite any actual examples of Eisenstat “destroy any political speech she disagreed with by classifying it as ‘hate speech’.” He concluded by huffing:
This MSNBC propaganda segment highlighted the ever-expanding attempts by the left to use “hate speech” to silence dissent and centralize power under themselves both through governmental legislation and private corporations. Their real enemy was never hate; it was the First Amendment.
Again Kotara didn’t explain why online hate should and must be allowed to spread unchecked.
Tim Graham used a July 8 post to complain that the Washington Post got an apparently fake account banned of an apparently nonexistent person who spouted views presented as,liberal, insisting the account was really brilliant satire:
Among the Twitter bot accounts that the liberal media hate most are the fake liberal bots who make liberals look like obnoxious idiots — or who are a little too clumsy and inartful, and make liberals think it must be a conservative plot. It’s like a version of banning The Babylon Bee because its satire hits too close to home.
Consider the case of “Erica Marsh,” who tripped the liberal alarms with a June 29 tweet after the Supreme Court upended race-based admissions at Harvard. “Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed.”
As Legal Insurrection noted, this caused a wave of outrage, particularly among black conservatives like Candace Owens, Bo Snerdley, Leo Terrell and others.
On July 4, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post reported their inquiries to Twitter caused the “Erica Marsh” account to be suspended after her Supreme Court tweet was viewed more than 27 million times.
[…]Harwell noted what he and the other liberals — sorry, the “misinformation experts” were thinking: “For months, Marsh’s account had raised suspicions among online misinformation experts due to her lack of a real-world footprint and her devotion to attention-grabbing viewpoints one called “cartoonishly liberal.” For example, Harwell noted, last month she said she still wears “2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine.”
Most Twitter users — at least the ones outside the censorious left — find parody accounts amusing, but you want to know what is a parody account and what’s not. You might wonder if @AOC is a parody, and not the AOC parody accounts. When Harwell turned back to his expert on “rage” and Twitter, did he consider that the left-wing side is also vulnerable to rage bait?
Funny, we don’t recall Graham ever liking a tweet from The Onion. And Graham offered no examples of right-wing rage-bait to which liberals have been “vulnerable.”