It turns out that Elton John is not a fan of the Rocket Man Elon Musk. Elton stated “all my life I’ve tried to use music to bring people together.” Elton is not happy with the new “misinformation policy” at Twitter since Elon Musk assumed control. Elton has decided to leave the platform.

It has been an interesting week at Twitter as the journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss have been given access to the data concerning Twitter’s past actions in discriminating against conservative voices. 

Americans have witnessed numerous examples of whistleblowers leaking insider information when conservatives control the government. The leftist New York Times is happy to assist insiders who wish to stop public policy the Times does not support. Very rarely does it work the other way.The only reason the Twitter scandal has become public news is because Elon Musk spent $44 billion to purchase the company.

Over the past decade, Twitter has become the de facto public square. What became apparent in the last few years was the similarity between the Twitter public square and the Chinese public square. Voices opposed to the authoritarian leftist or communist powers were squashed. 

Conservatives began to raise concerns that Twitter was shadow banning their voices on the platform. Shadow banning occurred when the leftists in control at Twitter would make conservative posts or comments invisible to the public. 

One major example of this occurred when the New York Post published a story based on information found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The information was damaging to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Twitter executives decided to prohibit the Hunter Biden story from being published or amplified on the Twitter platform. One Twitter executive pushed back. He wrote “can we truthfully claim that this is part of our policy? Asked Brandon Borrman, Vice President of Twitter Communications. Borrman was referring to Twitter policy against hate speech.

Yoel Roth, then head of Twitter Trust and Safety stated “we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing content from being amplified.” Roth was correct that Twitter was erring  and it was because they were erring to the benefit of their preferred presidential candidate. 

The fact that Twitter was banning conservative stories or ideas should not be a surprise. Most Twitter employees were college graduates and had spent years on campuses that routinely ban the expression of conservative ideas. Professors who express conservative principles are routinely dismissed or denied promotion. Numerous surveys have discovered that only 1-3% of college professors identify themselves as conservative. Ironically, if a college had 1-3% of its faculty from ethnic backgrounds, the college would be forced to close and would receive no government funds. Discriminating against conservatives, however, is condoned and accepted. 

With this lack of diverse view- points on college campuses, it is easy to understand how the graduates of these institutions end up discriminating against conservatives on the social media platforms. Just as the children of abusive parents often end up abusing their children, these college graduates who witness so much political discrimination slide into the same practice in their careers.

It is also puzzling to understand why the mainstream media would not deem it newsworthy that social media platforms were tamping down conservative viewpoints. Those of you with gray hair can remember when the Pentagon Papers (a classified Defense Department report on the Vietnam War) was leaked to news reporters. The New York Times and the Washington Post published the classified documents. Movies have been made about the courage of the papers in publishing the documents. 

Today, the New York Times and the Washington Post have been hijacked by graduates of our university system that do not respect the idea of freedom of speech. It is not surprising that these once venerable press institutions have become partisan outlets that suppress conservative viewpoints.

I am happy that the real Rocket Man, Elon Musk, has given considerable amounts of his time and money to expose and end discrimination against conservative viewpoints on Twitter. Hopefully, Elon can help America find its way back to the “Yellow Brick Road” of free speech and tolerance.

Bob Spencer
Publisher
Manatee Herald
publisher@manateeherald.com

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