Kevin Roose (New York Times technology reporter), who uses his column to push social media enterprises towards anti-conservative censorship has a leftist take. In Sunday’s edition, “Pivot For Twitter: The ‘People’s Tool’ has Now Become a Mogul’s Tool.” The headline online was even more hostile and implicitly compared Musk to authoritarians. “Twitter: Once a Threat To Titans, Now Belongs with One.”
Twitter was a young, scrappy microblogging service that emerged a decade ago. It felt like a tool to challenge authority.
Twitter was used by pro-democracy activists in Egypt and Libya to overthrow dictatorships. It was used by Americans to occupy Wall Street. After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, #BlackLivesMatter was born on Twitter.
These campaigns fuelled one of the most important ideas of the 2010s: social media was an underdog’s vision, a tool for bottom up organizing that would empower dissidents, topple corrupt institutions, and give ordinary people equal access to tycoons ….and tyrants.
This week, Twitter became the property and sole owner of Twitter, ending a shaky narrative that was perhaps all along.
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It also served as a symbol of the end of a decade in social media that was, in many ways more useful to the powerful than to the powerless.
Can you really call Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, media-loved Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter powerless. BLM’s online mob of supporters had a scholar fired by a liberal nonprofit because he posted an academic study that suggested street riots don’t attract voters. Sounds like power.
Twitter has always been sensitive to the sensibilities liberals easily offended. It bans users from relaying innocuous jokes about journalists learning to code and accurately identifying biological men. Twitter censored Hunter Biden’s laptop contents late in the 2020 presidential campaign, interfering with the democratic process. These were not the kind of “power” Roose ever worried about, but power flexes made by leftists who ran the platform in the past.
Roose views intimidation as the exclusive domain of the right against marginalized groups, ignoring numerous instances of the closing down of conservative ideas, accounts that dare advance heterodox views about transgender issues, gender identification, and the origin of COVID and the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines.
As Twitter and other social media networks grew, powerful people discovered that these apps could help increase their power in new ways. They could be used by authoritarians to suppress dissent. Extremists discovered they could create hateful mobs to drive people of color and women offline
Roose believes that Donald Trump’s account on Twitter made him president, and not millions of voters who never tweeted. It is a mystery how he “undermine[d] the public health” via Twitter.
It was even more difficult to argue that the app was a gift for the downtrodden after Donald J. Trump rode a wave to the White House in 2016 and used his Twitter account to spread conspiracy theories and wage culture wars, undermine public healthcare, and threaten nuclear war.
Clearly, Roose would rather social media be dominated by censorious billionaire leftists such as Carlos Maza, a former Vox-journalist who Roose praised in 2020 for getting conservative comedian Steven Crowder “demonetized.”
