Perhaps their biggest complaint is that Twitter is no longer a partisan progressive far-left echo chamber.
The Atlantic really hates that Twitter isn't a progressive playground anymore. They hate that leftist journalists don't hold sway with Twitter execs anymore. They can no longer convince them to suspend, lock or banish accounts who offer views they don't agree with.
They hate that officials from Biden's federal government can't push propaganda like it's fact through Twitter back channels. And most of all they hate that Elon Musk dedication to a free speech platform makes Twitter a more open, more robust space for discourse and ideas.
The left used to be all about free speech, they held it up like a beacon, saying things like "I deplore your views, but I respect your right to have them." The days of ope-minded leftist discourse is gone, and it's been replaced with ideologues thinking and tweeting in lock-step, terrified that anyone will ask them simple questions they can't answer like "what is a woman," or "why can't minors get tattoos but they can get sex changes."
Twitter "is now a right-wing social network," writes Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, claiming that owner Elon Musk is "a far-right activist." Musk's greatest crime here, however, is asking questions, not believing what he's been told by the political power elite, and taking a stand against partisan hegemony on the world's best social media platform.
Musk has made free speech a priority, but to a progressive left that values compliance and conformity over freedom and liberty, free speech is a threat they cannot abide, and so they must slur anyone who holds it as a guiding principle. Instead of recognizing that the platform under previous management had skewed so far left that any correction to the center looked like a conservative pivot, The Atlantic has determined that all Republicans and conservatives are far-right, including presidential candidates.
"Anything and anyone these people can't control and censor gets called 'right-wing' (or 'a Russian agent').
"They're dealing with their collapsed relevance and the contempt the public has for them quite poorly: by lashing out like shrieking hysterics as their ship sinks," Glenn Greenwald said.
Twitter will be the launching place of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign on Wednesday night, in a move that many are calling a "game-changer." But The Atlantic believes that instead of this being a savvy move on behalf of Musk, it means that Twitter "is a launch pad for right-wing political leaders." Conservatives and the GOP can be nothing else to Warzel but "far-right."
Musk engages across the platform, taking an active stake and stand in the company he bought, overvalued it turns out, at $44 billion. He's got to find a way to make the thing turn a profit, and in engaging the platform as a place not only to talk about ideas, but a place to launch presidential campaigns, products, and content, he is giving users a reason to go to Twitter other than just to spout off and read the rants of others.
In the Twitter Files, we saw that Twitter, under the ask of the FBI, targetted satirical accounts and posts, that the Biden administration pushed a Covid and vaccine narrative to the point where dissent would not be tolerated, and they got Twitter execs and moderators to implement it.
Twitter moderators locked and permanently suspended accounts that called men who identify as transgender men, or used the given name of a person, like Ellen Page, who changed it to an opposite sex version of the name. We saw that some journalists, like Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz, had special privileges with the social media site. And all of this was done behind the scenes, obfuscated.
Under Musk's leadership, this has all come crashing to a halt. The Atlantic calls him a conspiracy theorist, but nearly every so-called conspiracy theory of the past few years, from Covid having leaked from a Chinese lab, to Hunter Biden's laptop from hell, to the FBI interfering in Twitter content, has proven out.
"Twitter has become a right-wing echo chamber," Warzel writes, but perhaps his biggest complaint is that it's no longer a partisan progressive far-left echo chamber. More voices are being heard on the site, and that's good for free-speech, it's good for Twitter, and it's very good for democracy at large.
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