The Twitter Files are much ado about nothing
In his Twitter Files threads, so far written by Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, Elon Musk has confirmed what everyone already knew. Twitter actively suppressed information potentially damaging to candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 election. It also suppressed or censored both conservative content in general and content critical of the Covid Regime by people from across the political spectrum.
Prominent talking heads have posited that “the future of our democracy” depends upon how social media platforms are administered. Such high drama makes people on both sides of this non-Issue feel good, as if they are fighting for something important.
The truth is social media censorship has very little effect on the outcome of elections, if any at all.
Even Musk believes he is fighting for free speech. Supposedly, exposing Twitter’s politically motivated censorship (and we can assume similar behavior from Facebook and other large platforms) is the first step in “doing something about” this totalitarian behavior and restoring the free flow of information vital to Americans making informed political decisions.
It’s hard to know where to begin debunking that statement. Perhaps the best place is the false premise underpinning all of it: that media companies, social or otherwise, have an obligation to publish content they don’t agree with or otherwise would rather not publish. They don’t.
Moreover, they have an absolute right to hold and publish opinions which coincide with a particular political party, the government, the administrative or “deep” states, or any other on the list of parasitic institutions the majority of Americans support.
The free speech and property rights position is unambiguous here. Yes, Twitter “is a private company and can do what it wants.” It’s especially painful to hear libertarians saying this as if it were a burn.
Often, people searching for rationalization to violating the property rights of social media companies will conflate the property right in question with intellectual property (IP) rights. This has nothing to do with IP. This has to do with whether Twitter has an obligation to invest its resources into providing people user accounts or publishing content it doesn’t with to publish.
A Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram account doesn’t spring into existence on its own. It is the product of someone’s labor which the company had to pay for. Both the user accounts themselves and the platforms in general were not only created with the owners’ capital but represent an ongoing expense for the owners to maintain.
No one has a right to the product of another’s labor. No one has a right to anything someone else must be forced to provide. Therefore, no one has a right to a Twitter account. This is basic stuff.
It’s also nothing new
News media has been politically biased for all of American history. The newspaper that published the censored Hunter Biden story, the New York Post, was founded by Alexander Hamilton for the express purpose of smearing his political enemies.
Hamilton’s political arch enemy, Thomas Jefferson, was no different. He paid James Callender to smear the Federalists with a torrent of partisan vitriol, factual and otherwise.
Neither side made any pretense of being “fair and balanced” or recognized any obligation to publish opposing views. Nor did media in the decades that followed. The notion news media is supposed to be unbiased and objective is a fairytale of the Progressive Era that was never true.
Neither is government influence on the media anything new. As Jefferson said of the media in Great Britain,
“You know well that that government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.”
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