When I first heard about Twitter, I asked someone what it was about. After I heard what people were tweeting, I decided no one needed to hear what I had for lunch. Obviously, I underestimated the importance of the medium, but I am nevertheless very happy I never opened an account.
Over the last six years, there's been a firestorm over Twitter, who can be on Twitter, what can be said on Twitter, and how Twitter censored certain viewpoints. Generally speaking, I suppose I don't understand what all the fuss is about. But upon further inspection, something very invidious took place.
Earlier this year, Tesla owner Elon Musk bought Twitter. We can only guess at his motives, but thank goodness he did. Upon taking over, Mr. Musk opened up the files of his new company and allowed two independent -- and it should be pointed out, left-leaning -- journalists, Matt Taibi and Bari Weiss, to report on what they discovered. What's been reported not only has rocked the nation, but it's also confirmed what many have suspected for a long time: Twitter censored viewpoints with which it disagreed, shadow banned some people, and did other things to tweets that made them unavailable to viewers. What people didn't suspect, however, was that not only was it members of Twitter that were engaged in the censorship but that these Twitter employees were working in tandem with the FBI and the Biden presidential campaign.
It goes without saying that as a private company, Twitter was well within its rights to publish whatever it wanted, as well as censor whatever it wanted. Where the line was crossed, however, was when it was getting direction from the FBI, a unit of the federal government. It's also questionable whether the Biden campaign's involvement crossed constitutional lines (if the Biden campaign received federal funds, I contend, it was thereby a quasi-governmental unit bound by the Constitution in the same way a university received federal funding is). So while Twitter would otherwise have the right to do with its platform whatever it liked (withing constitutional reason, of course), once the FBI and the Biden campaign got involved, the equation was queered.
Why this is at all relevant is that two topics had a direct impact on the 2020 election. First, the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco -- was the laptop the product of Russian operatives or real, were the emails contained therein Russian disinformation, was Man of Dementia involved in influence peddling -- had a crucial bearing on the election. From certain reports, as much as 17% of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they been told the truth of the laptop story. Depending on where those voters lived, that could have changed the outcome of the vote and therefore the results of the Electoral College.
The other story that was suppressed was the origins of Covid. Debate raged as to not only the origins of the virus, but also whether the vaccines and the masks were effective. How did this impact the 2020 election? Not having all the perspectives out on the table allowed certain states, such as Pennsylvania, to alter the voting rules to favor the Democrats over the Republicans. It's a little like allowing the home team to move the goalposts when the other team has the ball to make it much harder for it to score.
Now that Republicans have taken back the House, I earnestly hope they don't go tit-for-tat with investigations to pay back the Democrats. I do, however, hope they launch investigations into Hunter Biden and the FBI. If Republicans regain both the presidency and the Senate while holding onto the House in 2024, they need to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold social media companies accountable for such invidious, undemocratic behavior.
(c) 2022 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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