Twitter: The greatest threat to freedom of expression from Elon Musk is his liberal critics

They fear that Musk will put into practice what he has occasionally said about a Twitter with less censorship and more pluralism. Yes, you read that right, the liberal centre-right is not afraid that Musk will increase censorship, but that he will reduce it, allowing for non-«correct» views.

A few days ago, for example, a columnist in the Washington Post (of Bezos!) tweeted: «I am horrified by the social and political implications of Musk's acquisition of Twitter. He seems to believe that anything goes on social media. For democracy to survive, we need more control over content, not less.» Another, again, compared the takeover to the years before Hitler came to power.

As Glen Greenwald has written, the new religion of liberals in the West is censorship, and their concern is how to silence their political opponents. At first they did this by hopelessly stretching the otherwise vague concept of «hate speech» to accommodate any opinion they did not like or that made them uncomfortable.

Lately their favorite way of censorship is to accuse their political opponents of spreading “fake news”, demanding their blocking by the MDBs and beyond. What counts as fake news is of course even more blurred than hate speech.

So, before the November 2020 presidential election in 2020, the revelations about Hunter Biden's «business» in Ukraine were considered fake news, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Twitter blocked the accounts of the New York Post, the newspaper that published the story about Hunter Biden's laptop, as well as any reference to it. A few months later, however, the story turned out to be entirely true, as even the flagship of American liberalism, the New York Times, admitted, and the evidence coming out is even more incriminating for the Bidens.

The liberal elites are exploiting the repeated crises of recent years to impose an increasingly suffocating control of information. The beginning was made in the US with the notorious Russiagate, the idea that Trump won the 2016 election because of the dark Russian interference and not because Hillary Clinton was perceived as the hated representative of the rich and the establishment by a large part of the American electorate, especially by the grassroots.

Therefore, in response to the alleged manipulation of the media by foreign agents, they imposed even stricter control of content on social media, which in most cases was directed against the left rather than the alt right. Leftist and movement collectives, alternative media saw their pages on the media being downgraded or even deleted everywhere.

Then came the pandemic and the major platforms engaged in a new round of even harsher censorship, this time against those who criticised the loquodowns and other authoritarian measures. Any opinion that deviated even slightly from the imposed state policy of managing the pandemic, even on the origin of the virus, was labelled as anti-scientific disinformation and was summarily taken down.

In Greece, censorship was extended to media (such as ThePressProject), journalists or even artists who simply criticized the government, even on issues unrelated to the pandemic. Who can forget the systematic taking down of posts and blocking of accounts from Facebook and Twitter, on the occasion of Koufontina's hunger strike.

Now it is the war in Ukraine that creates a new glorious field of glory for the extreme centrist censors. Entire international media such as Russia Today and Sputnik were banned entirely in the West, without anyone turning up their noses because they broadcast Russian propaganda, unlike, say, the Western media which broadcast exclusively American state propaganda. At the same time, anyone who does not willingly parrot the official Western narrative of the war is automatically branded as a useful idiot or agent of Putin.

This regime of «single truth» is what they fear Musk will now disrupt, not because he is a wealth tycoon who will amass even more power in his hands if he controls one of the largest and most popular platforms of the MSM. But because are not convinced that he shares the same ideological concerns as they do, but are mainly concerned that he will relax censorship!

Of course Musk is no guarantee of a freer and more pluralistic Twitter. In addition to being a political reactionary, he has his own history of censorship on... Twitter against those who criticize him, for example for the way he treats Tesla workers. In any case, it is a blatant contradiction and tragic irony to expect a billionaire oligarch to guarantee freedom of expression.

However, the hysterical reactions to the takeover of Twitter by Tesla's boss are extremely revealing. They show that Western liberals and the far right not only tolerate state and corporate censorship but ardently seek it.

They have even gone so far as to reverse history, as Greenwald notes. They blame freedom of expression and thought as the favorite weapons of fascists and authoritarian leaders like Putin and Trump, and portray censorship as the last line of defense of Western civilization against their infernal designs.

In the liberals« double speak, democracy is synonymous with censorship and »excessive" freedom of expression leads to fascism. In front of them, Musk looks like a Boy Scout.

By Dimitris Tsirka