This is a biased, nonsense story by Agence France Press, uncritically carried by our South China Morning Post. I forgive the Post, for that’s what they do on their World News page, just like many papers. You have to get a paper out, every day, after all. A bunch of agency stories helps meet deadline. Still...
My Comments:
1. “Cesspool”: Not my Twitter experience. I follow ~200, left, right and centre. I don’t notice any increase in “cesspool-ism”.
2. “Cesspool”: sounds like a mandated talking point, like the one on Twitter Files, where anyone reporting on this (very newsworthy) story was slammed for “doing PR for the world’s richest man”. (As Greenwald shows here). It’s really quite remarkable how ever single one of the criticisms of the reports on Twitter Files, used exactly the same words. And now it’s “cesspool”.
3. Pamela Geller: given as an example of the horridness of Twitter under Musk. That she was allowed back after having been banned by Old Twitter. Happens I know Geller's writing. Never really liked her, never knew she’d been banned on Twitter, never knew she’d come back on Twitter.
BUT -- and here’s the key point -- You Don’t Have To Follow Her! It’s up to you. If you don’t see Geller tweets you don’t need to be triggered by her. By the way, she’s not “anti-Muslim”, but “anti-Islam”. Which is very different. She’s critical of Islam, which is an ideology. We should all be free to criticise any ideology: capitalism, socialism, marxism, nazism. Islamism. Without being banned.
4. This article is itself misinformation: that is “lying". It lies by commission and by omission. By commission: putting all the “scare examples” right there in the first para, and acting like it’s a “cesspool” because it says so. And it lies by omission, by failing to mention the Twitter Files: the now open record of how the FBI worked with Twitter to suppress voices exclusively on the Right. And in particular the “Laptop from Hell”. That’s a pretty major failure of reporting right here. One that many on the not-crazy-left, like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger have noted. But which MSM has studiously ignored.
5. Making Free Speech a dirty word. (or dirty phrase, I guess). Note how they do that. So that “Free Speech absolutist” is now pejorative, from the POV of the Left.
6. Better takes on Twitter: There’s a talk with Lex Fridman, Eric Weinstein and Kimbal Musk, on “how to improve Twitter" And David Sacks on Unherd. And Glenn Greenwald on “Media silent on Twitter files...”. Twitter is doing quick improvement to service by quick A/B testing. What works stays. What doesn’t goes. That’s quick work.
7: Twitter is getting better and more interesting. That’s the bottom line. Go see. It’s better!
