We’ve barely made it into one month of Elon Musk owning Twitter, and the caterwauling from liberals continues. At first, the left tried forcing Elon Musk away from Twitter to prevent a purchase. That ship has sailed in the month since Musk completed his acquisition of the social media site. The new plan: destroy Twitter, forcing it to implode and go bankrupt.
Left attacks Twitter’s revenue sources.
It’s a simple strategy: if the left can’t have Twitter, neither can anyone else. The initial plan for tanking Twitter was to scare away or target advertisers. As former Twitter employee Yoel Roth wrote in the New York Times, 90% of Twitter’s revenue came from advertisements when he left.
Elon Musk is working to create new revenue streams for Twitter, but in the meantime, destroying Twitter’s primary revenue source is a top priority for the left. Getting companies to decrease ad spending is an easy sell at the moment because the entire online advertising business is preparing for a recession. Spending is down industry-wide, and that has nothing to do with Twitter.
It is likely Musk will be able to offset some of this with new paid features on Twitter. Since Twitter has shifted into a private company, Musk won’t have to report how successful he is, but spinning up new features and testing new possibilities is a constant feature of the platform.
Next step: bring in Big Tech.
Barring a revenue collapse, the more nefarious tactic getting explored by progressives is preventing people from downloading the Twitter app. Yoel Roth hinted at this possibility in his New York Times column: “There is one more source of power on the web — one that most people don’t think much about but may be the most significant check on unrestrained speech on the mainstream internet: the app stores operated by Google and Apple.”
This solution demands that companies like Apple and Google remove Twitter from their app stores to prevent people from downloading and accessing the service. As Roth suggests, “This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes.”
In other words, Roth is suggesting Big Tech, as opposed to Big Brother, should regulate Musk’s behavior with Twitter. Roth encourages that in his piece, “the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome…”
“Unrestrained free speech” is evil to the new left. Stopping it is their only goal these days, even if concrete definitions of the boundaries of free speech are hard to define.
The Washington Post calls for Big Tech to regulate Musk.
And what Yoel Roth suggested as possibilities in a column, Washington Post journalists are calling for as a fact. In a piece headlined “Opening the gates of Hell,” Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz blasts Musk for offering amnesty for all the accounts banned under previous leadership.
Lorenz tracked down an “expert” to give her the line: “Apple and Google need to seriously start exploring booting Twitter off the app store … What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. It’s like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will cause. People who engaged in direct targeted harassment can come back and engage in doxing, targeted harassment, vicious bullying, calls for violence, celebration of violence. I can’t even begin to state how dangerous this will be.”
Never mind that what Lorenz describes is precisely what the press has done to ordinary people for creating funny political gifs. Lorenz did this exact thing herself by doxxing an account that does nothing more than repost liberal videos on Tik Tok.
Petty tyrants are rising up.
What Roth suggested could happen, the Washington Post is now saying is necessary in a reported article. It’s an effort to destroy a company for the owner’s efforts to encourage free speech – the essence of petty tyranny.
However, removing Twitter from app stores would not be the story’s end. That action would cause an immediate uproar, and Congress would be forced to step in with hearings and new legislation. If Apple or Microsoft want to receive new regulations that control what apps they can and can’t admit on their platforms, kicking Twitter off their platform or trying to control Musk are sure-fire ways to get that kind of scrutiny.
All this is going down less than a month after Elon Musk purchased Twitter. The anger is catapulting the liberal media into finding new ways to censor and control speech and people. It’s not enough to have government regulations; now, all private industry has to submit to control what all information and speech looks like at all times.
China does this through sheer force of government. The left wants to do it through Big Tech. Elon Musk isn’t perfect by any stretch, but at least he’s not a tyrant trying to control everyone.