Tim Donner
Liberty Nation
Headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and promising – or, for some, threatening – to alter the long-embedded, free-spending bureaucratic culture of the nation’s capital, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been the talk of the Swamp since President-elect Donald Trump announced it. But a different decision made by Elon Musk two years ago has already proven to be even more significant.
For the bargain price of a mere $44 billion, Mr Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X, unleashing an entirely new brand of social media where censorship would no longer exist as a defining characteristic. Musk promised just one thing: He would no longer cancel the expression of opinions on his site that did not conform to establishment groupthink, instead turning it into a genuinely open forum for all comers. The exact impact of Musk’s purchase is hard to quantify, but it has proven to be transformative: a true game-changer. Of course, Musk’s eventual alliance with Donald Trump has made the platform even more prominent.
The effect of the Twitter/X reversal cannot be understated. Ask yourself this question: If Musk had bought Twitter before the 2020 presidential election instead of after, would the Hunter Biden laptop story have been buried as it was by Twitter and the other major social media platforms and legacy media? Post-election surveys indicated that, thanks to the widespread embargo of the story, a majority of voters were not even aware of the laptop’s myriad revelations of corruption and influence peddling. But it also revealed that enough of them would have changed their votes if they had known about it to land Trump back in the White House without a four-year hiatus.
It is also clear that legitimate inquiry about Covid-19, particularly about it emanating from the Wuhan lab, now widely considered the most likely source of the killer pandemic, would not have been ridiculed, dismissed, and censored by government-sanctioned ‘experts,’ per the voluminous revelations in the “Twitter Files.”
Leftists Can’t Handle Musk
The rise of X has also revealed just how narrow-minded the supposedly tolerant left has become. When Trump re-captured the White House in November, Trump-hating progressives took their toys and went home, fleeing X for the safety of the new left-wing echo chamber known as Bluesky, where no one even suspected of supporting Trump or conservatives is allowed to participate.
As Andrew Moran of Liberty Nation News, an accomplished expert on X, says, leftists bailed out on the false premise that: “X has turned into a right-wing echo chamber, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Even MSNBC and CNN have reported that X is a reflection of the American electorate: half Democrat, half Republican. Before the Musk era, conservatives were routinely censored, shadow-banned, or kicked off the site.” Now it is conservatives who have been openly and unilaterally banned from Bluesky. As we have witnessed in many other ways of late, these hardcore leftists simply cannot handle any opinions differing from their own.
Moran adds that the old Twitter “created a climate of fear for anyone wanting to share opinions that differed from the content moderators. It is rare now to find an occasion where someone is banned for sharing an opinion, no matter how foul or inaccurate. It is truly a digital town square where everyone can openly engage in dialogue without concerns about retribution.”
One suspects many of those who found refuge in Bluesky as they melted down after Trump’s election will one day return to X, since it offers a range of information, discussion, and entertainment they will never receive on the exclusively left-wing platform. It might well turn out to be a mirror image of 2020, when many conservatives bailed on Fox News and turned to the likes of Newsmax after Fox made what they thought was a premature call that Joe Biden would win the state of Arizona. But most eventually returned to Fox for its far broader spectrum of coverage.
Musk’s takeover has had far-reaching consequences beyond the site itself. As the most prominent and influential social media company in the nation, X has forced its competitors such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram to re-evaluate their own policies in order to keep pace – a phenomenon common to all industries. Though there are no metrics available, it certainly appears that instances of cancellation and censorship across the full range of social media have noticeably decreased.
When the political history of the early 21st century is written, Twitter censorship and its conversion to X-style free speech should hold a prominent position. Elon Musk has risen to the top of the heap as he has in his other celebrated ground-breaking initiatives, most prominently Tesla and SpaceX. He has single-handedly transformed a modern-day communications industry that has far surpassed the power of television and newspapers – one which will only grow more dominant in the decades ahead.
This article was originally published by Liberty Nation News.
