"They're Targeting Twitter For Not Complying"
The Washington Post falsely accuses Twitter of rising anti-Semitisim
The Washington Post claims that Twitter has seen a rise in anti-Semitism since Elon Musk purchased it last year. We debunked those claims last month. The report on which those claims are based counted as “anti-Semitic” tweets criticizing George Soros and the World Economic Forum.
I spoke to an anonymous “trust and safety” professional about what’s happening.
Why are so many groups targeting Twitter for attacks right now?
There’s an ideology. It has a lot of different names. Call it “the Cathedral,” “successor ideology,” “the Longhouse,” or “Wokeism.” One precept of that ideology is that if someone disagrees with you and the ideology, then it is right, good, and proper for that person to be silenced, removed, and have all manner of services, such as banking and publishing, denied to them. The proper response, they believe, is to cut them out of society in the most passive-aggressive way possible.
The phenomenon is strongest among late Gen X and early Millennials. It’s safetyism ideology for a coddled generation that lacks the courage to stand up for its convictions, so consensus is achieved by muting their opponents. “Someone who is outside of the norm, their views are illegitimate, and we must not service them, and they must disappear.”
In the U.S., the First Amendment prohibits state censorship, and so the blue-haired content moderators at Google, Reddit, and Facebook carry it out in an informal manner instead. In Europe, the government can carry out censorship, and the moderators at Big Tech companies are all to happy to oblige. When they get a request to take someone down and deplatform them, it’s no problem, so long as the money keeps coming in.
Twitter isn’t playing ball anymore, so the site and particularly its moderation function is pivoting towards the center and center-right. Elon says, “We think free speech is important.” Well, only about half of the United States agrees with him, and the rest of the world doesn’t agree with him. This is why advertisers, being large, global corporations whose viewpoints do not generally reflect the U.S.-center-right-specific affinity for freedom of expression, teamed up with NGOs to deny ad revenue to Twitter. They’re targeting Twitter for not complying.
What should Musk do?
Already foreign and US NGOs use law enforcement to have legal content in the US removed in the US. They create dossiers of information and forward it to the police demanding that this or that account must go.
Twitter needs to be on war footing to deal with the kinds of attacks they’re going to get. Most of the world is hostile to free speech. I don’t get the sense that Twitter is prepared to take on the entire world as a free-speech platform.