[NOTE: I see that Twitterfiles #6 is now up [hat tip: commenter “Griffin]. I plan to deal with it in a post tomorrow.]
John Hayward writes:
The corruption Musk is exposing at Twitter makes it seem more obvious in retrospect that the Internet would become an instrument of totalitarianism, much more than it would be a bold new frontier for free speech…
The idealistic vision of Internet freedom came closest to reality during the golden age of the blog, which only lasted a decade or so. Bloggers built their own networks and found their own audiences. It was difficult to silence them. They made history a few times.
Blogging was supplanted by social media, which allowed totalitarian ideologies and political corruption to flourish because they created choke points that could be controlled by a few massive corporations and their politicized staffers.
Instead of bloggers setting up their own websites, linking to each other, and building their own traffic networks, now we had a handful of platforms that provided the ILLUSION of free speech, and it seemed to be easier than blogging – but as Musk is showing us, it was a lie.
Centralization of information was too big a temptation for those who yearn for power, and for those who already have power. That became apparent even before the Twitter files were released, but now it’s completely obvious.
For whatever reasons, I loved blogs from the start and hated social media from the start. But I don’t think that was because I looked into a crystal ball and immediately saw what the future held. What did I see in social media? I saw huge rewards for the cruel quick jab and a way to amplify the nastiness across the country and even the world. I saw wokeness destroy people early on – Justine Sacco, for example, whom I wrote about here, who learned how very costly a joke on social media could be if it offended the woke.
Here are some Twitter banning decisions I wrote about that disturbed me in various ways: this and this. And here’s an interesting post from 2017, about the power of Twitter. It ends with this thought:
Prior to Twitter, presidents and other government officials communicated with the public through government channels, sometimes filtered through the MSM. Social media such as Twitter allows a president to reach the public more directly. But there’s still a middleman—Twitter itself. The president and the public rely on the integrity of the Twitter system, but is there any real reason to trust it?
That last question was always merely rhetorical.
And hey, I even wrote about Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council and called it “Orwellian” in early 2016, which is when it first was instituted:
Apparently the social justice warriors have come to police twitter, via something with the quasi-Orwellian title of the Trust and Safety Council. I suggest you follow the link to learn more about it, but it seems to be some sort of attempt to “ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.”
But I thought the whole point of Twitter was verbal combat in an unsafe place…
Oh, did I mention that conservative blogger and author Stacy McCain was recently banned, and several conservative bloggers have also quit in protest?
Apparently Yoel Roth had not yet come onboard as the head of Trust and Safety. His predecessor was mentioned here:
Only a few weeks earlier, Twitter had announced the creation of a “Trust and Safety Council,” to which it appointed Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist known for denouncing “sexism” in video games, a prominent figure in the Gamergate controversy—and oh yes, a frequent target of criticism from McCain. So it sure looks like the moment Twitter gave Sarkeesian the power to do so, she started blackballing her critics.
Is this what has come from the Internet’s promise of open and unfettered speech, liberated from the gatekeepers of the “legacy media”? Or did we make the old gatekeepers obsolete, only so we could impose new ones?
The whole thing reminds me of the book Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after Democracy in America. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, he examined the failed promise of France’s rebellion against monarchy. What concerned him was not just the Terror and the beheadings, but the fact that the French toppled all of their institutions and tried to remake their politics, only to see all the old institutions re-assert themselves. They ended up with the same system, just under new rulers. The main similarity between the new system and the Ancien Régime was its administrative centralization, the way everything was controlled out of Paris, sapping all power and initiative from local institutions.
But I think social media became a worse system than what it replaced. A centralized platform such as Twitter facilitates a more extreme reach for the censor.
[NOTE II: Yesterday Elon Musk banned some Twitter users on the left, several of them journalists, and the left was outraged. They’re used to being the ones to control things and they believe they have an absolute right to do so. Musk’s bannings don’t seem arbitrary or political, because they have to do with violating rules about doxxing by location tracking in real time. Please read this.]
