It has been a month since Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter. Changes are happening at a fast pace, potentially proving SR-71 pilot Paul Crickmore’s point “You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.”
According to President Biden, this is a platform for lies. FoxBusiness:
President Biden mentioned Elon Musk and Twitter during a fundraiser Friday night …
“Elon Musk goes out and buys an outlet that sends — that spews lies all across the world,” Biden remarked. “There are no editors anymore in America. There are no editors.”
The president seemed to suggest there was no longer any moderation on Twitter, a claim echoed by several others on the platform who are also critical of Musk.
“How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake? What is at stake? So there’s a lot going on, a lot going on. But we have an enormous opportunity, enormous opportunity,” Biden added.
Biden’s comments soon after a White House tweet bragging about the Social Security cost-of-living increase was flagged by Twitter for lacking “context.” The White House later deleted the tweet.
If there are lies there must also be truth, right? Here are some lies that ultimately resulted in Marjorie Taylor Greene being “permanently suspended” from Twitter:
The Truth at the time (August 2021) was that vaccines do prevent infection and spread of COVID-19. As of November 5, 2022, the above tweet remained inaccessible via a search for “the fda should not approve the covid vaccines (from:mtgreenee)”. Twitter returned the following screen:
For those who sought to read something critical of the Federal government, in other words, Twitter reminded them to cease their thoughtcrime and read only official Federal government sites.
I guess it was fair to say that there was a Ministry of Truth operating within Twitter in August 2021 and even earlier this month.
But if Joe Biden and the rest of the U.S. government want Twitter to prevent lies from being published, does it makes sense for each social media platform to decide what is a lie and what is the truth? Advertisers are supposedly demanding that Twitter eliminate lies from its platform (yet the cash-seeking Democrat running against Ron DeSantis was allowed to lie with impunity; see Twitter won’t suspend a politician who lies to get money?), but how can they have confidence unless Twitter follows an official source of truth and flags anything that contradicts that source? We don’t want Facebook and Twitter to have different concepts of lie vs. truth, do we?
Related:
- A corrected history of mRNA vaccines (a great recent example of Minitrue at work)
CNN truth in February cheers on the emergency powers in Canada (https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/14/americas/canada-truckers-protest-monday/index.html):
“This is about keeping Canadians safe, protecting peoples’ jobs and restoring faith in our institutions,” Trudeau said during a news conference in Ottawa, adding that the law will be limited geographically, in scope and in time.
CNN truth in November cheers on anti-lockdown protests in China (https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/28/china/china-protests-covid-political-freedom-intl-hnk-mic/index.html):
At the heart of China’s protests against zero-Covid, young people cry for freedom.