With the 2022 midterm elections less than a week away, it’s easy to be obsessed with the outcome of the vote. If recent polls are correct, this will be a “red wave” election in which Congress is returned to GOP control. But there’s another “red wave”: The one that’s washing over the Big Media and Social Media.
In recent days, the mainstream media have been in a tizzy following Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk’s dramatic $42 billion takeover of Twitter. Along with jokingly calling himself the “Chief Twit,” he promises major changes at the popular social-messaging site, with a total of 1.3 billion accounts and more than 200 million daily posts.
What’s left unsaid is what it will do for free speech and the return of centrist and conservative voices to social media. Musk, regardless of his politics, which range from left to right to everything in between depending on the issue, has been a robust defender of speech rights.
After taking over, Musk fired a whole suite of executives who had created and executed Twitter’s insidious plan to “de-platform” conservative voices from Twitter. The whole enabling apparatus seems set to go: Of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, some 50% to 75% are expected to get the axe as soon as this week.
With the likely restoration of hundreds if not thousands of suspended accounts, America’s thriving online opinion community is about to have part of its political and free speech ecosystem restored.
Musk vows to create a “content moderation council” made up of people holding “widely diverse viewpoints,” not a bunch of woke scolds. It’s expected to soon begin reinstating those who’ve been unjustly removed, some permanently.
Already, the entrepreneur has “frozen some employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and other policy enforcement, curbing the staff’s ability to clamp down on misinformation ahead of a major U.S. election,” according to Bloomberg.
Among those kicked off Twitter include former President Donald Trump, pillow-king Mike Lindell, investigative journalist James O’Keefe, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, retired Gen. and former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the humor website the Babylon Bee, and too many others. Many will now have their accounts restored.
But Twitter’s not the only social media giant facing changes.
Facebook faces its own reckoning. The company’s parent, Meta Platforms, has seen its stock plunge over 70% this year, losing roughly $630 billion, as CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg pursues his chimerical online virtual reality project, at a cost of $10 billion a year.
Growth for Facebook is essentially over, and new competitors, including China’s TikTok, are gaining eye-share. Its Instagram and WhatsApp portals are likewise struggling to compete.
“Facebook was always the weakest member of the FAANG gang,” wrote Daniel Greenfield at the Front Page website. “Where Amazon and Google had worked to build platforms for captive audiences, Facebook had little hold beyond a fragile social media ecosystem . . . TikTok has carved up the social media market for teens and pre-teens. Advertisers and investors are reacting appropriately.”
Can Meta’s Facebook and the others survive long-term in a no-growth economic environment if they continue to stifle the political beliefs of half of the population? Not likely.
Things won’t be helped by recent revelations that executives at both Twitter and Facebook met repeatedly with Department of Homeland Security officials about censoring a number of major stories. These include “the withdrawal from Afghanistan, coronavirus, and ‘racial justice’, according to leaked documents,” as Breitbart reported recently.
That was followed by a report that Alphabet’s Google search engine has been suppressing or slowing search requests by Republicans and conservatives leading up to the midterm elections.
“First, researchers caught Google red-handed by proving Republican campaign emails were sent to spam,” said Media Research Center President L. Brent Bozell. “Now we’ve uncovered Google manipulating search results to hide Republican campaign websites while promoting Democratic ones. This is all an effort by Google to help Democrats and interfere in the democratic process.”
Get the picture? This all adds up to an assault on Americans’ free-speech rights.
It’s clear that the “woke media” formula doesn’t work, as we begin to see just how corrupt some media have been.
What looks now to be a likely “red wave” election may turn into a “red wave” of change for social media as well.
From Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contains clear evidence of the Biden family’s corrupt profiteering from China, Russia, and Ukraine, to the 2016 election shenanigans, which show that Hillary Clinton and the FBI conspired against Donald Trump by concocting false charges based on phony evidence that he “colluded” with the Russians to win the presidency, the left-leaning social media have helped shut down what should have been healthy reporting and debate.
A shocking number of major newsworthy developments — the origins of the COVID-19 virus, Biden’s age-related mental fumblings, and the total disaster of our current economy’s inflation and energy crisis — continue to be tamped down as far-left social media outlets pursue their radical agendas.
Americans are fed up with de facto censorship, crime, and woke culture. It’s why Black and Hispanic Americans are thinking of voting against the Donkey Party for the first time ever. And why liberal subarbanites, angry at local schools’ failures and “defund the police”, are doing the same.
Freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Social media seemingly don’t recognize this. They should know: the red wave won’t just affect Congress, it’ll affect social media too.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Editor’s note: Thank you to our alert readers who caught the mistake in the second to last paragraph, which has been corrected.
I think your comment, “It’s why Black and Hispanic Americans are thinking of voting for the Donkey Party for the first time ever” should read “Elephant Party” and not Donkey.
The Donkey Party?
Thanks for noticing. It’s been corrected.
You left out *not* when saying …Black and Hispanic voters are thinking of NOT voting for the Donkey …
Thanks for catching that. It’s been updated.
A large part of this problem stems from the belief that the constitution only applies to government unless the government decides otherwise. We should impeach some Justices.
So as usual the pendulum starts to swing back.
And as usual it will overshoot.
Such is life…
“It’s why Black and Hispanic Americans are thinking of voting for the Donkey Party for the first time ever”
With regard to Black voters a majority probably voted Republican during reconstruction until it became too dangerous to do so, in fact too dangerous to even vote. When, exactly, did a majority of Black Americans finally become captive to the Donks?
Even before the November 2020 election, I seriously doubted that a Joe Biden presidency would be permitted to, assuming he genuinely wanted to, make a notably practical improvement in poor and low-income Americans’ quality of life.
In fact, I strongly suspect that any American president who would seriously try implementing truly humane, progressive policies — notably, a significant reduction in military spending, a genuine anti-war effort, universal single-payer healthcare, writing-off student deb, increasing the minimum wage while reigning in Wall Street — would likely be assassinated, sooner rather than later.
Perhaps it’s a large part why the Democratic National Committee greatly resists a Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy, regardless of what Democratic Party members/voters want. Hillary Clinton’s neo-liberalism, unlike Sanders’ fiscal progressiveness, was already known for not rubbing against big money, business and power grains.
Fiscal conservative ideology/politics, big business interests and most of the corporate mainstream news-media resist sufficiently progressive ideas from actually being implemented. Also, Republican representatives are likely manipulating the Democratic Party hierarchy into making the latter’s fiscal politics/policies even more conservative. They all seem to favor big money interests over people.
Meanwhile, powerful business interests can debilitate high-level elected officials through implicit or explicit threats to transfer or eliminate jobs and capital investment, thus economic stability, if corporate ‘requests’ are not accommodated. It’s a political crippling that’s worsened by a blaring news-media that’s permitted to be naturally critical of incumbent governments, especially in regards to job and capital transfers and economic weakening.
Thus, I believe that American presidents (and Canadian prime ministers) are mostly symbolically ‘in charge’, beneath the most power-entrenched and saturated national/corporate interests and institutions. Those elected heads ‘lead’ a virtual corpocracy, i.e. “a society dominated by politically and economically large corporations”.