Select Page


Op-Ed authored by Roger L. Simon via The Epoch Times,

Two and a half cheers for Elon Musk!

He has, after some back and forth, just bought Twitter, easily the greatest achievement anyone has accomplished in years for the First Amendment and freedom of speech.

If he follows through on his pledge to end censorship at the site, he has struck a blow, possibly even a fatal one, on the evil billionaires—we all know who they are—that control virtually the entire global information flow to all the continents and all the ships at sea for their own advantage.

These billionaire owners of social media sites have been more successful in their censorship and thought control, at least by the numbers, than any dictators in history. (Population of China: 1.4 billion. Number with Facebook accounts: 2.9 billion.)

So why only two and a half cheers for Musk?

Well, there is that matter of the Tesla factory in communist China with—it’s rumored—much of the company’s future research to be conducted there. That would presumably include Space X, with vast military implications. Once the enemy of the totalitarians in Beijing, Musk has, alas, folded in with them.

But still, give the man his due. Becoming an international hero of freedom may encourage him to go further yet. Some of his openness may even permeate China—not likely, but who knows?

Musk has charisma to spare.

I may even have to buy one of his cars, even though—cool as its technology may be, especially if it ultimately allows the vehicle to drive itself, and snazzy as the Model X looks in red—I’m more than a little skeptical of its contribution to the environment.

Still, two and a half cheers … going on three. Or three-plus, if he ultimately helps move the overcrowded human race to Mars, putting paid to his online adversary Bill Gates, who, it seems, would prefer to depopulate us.

But the big loser in all this is Mark Zuckerberg, who looks almost as bad as his buddy General Secretary Xi Jinping.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a panel talk at the 2020 Munich Security Conference (MSC) in Munich on Feb. 15, 2020. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)

Facebook has an estimated 15,000 (exact numbers vary) content moderators to restrict discussion or cancel those who don’t adhere to their master’s approved party line, dubbing their postings as “misinformation.” These junior censors work for something in the vicinity of $18 an hour for what, according to many reports, is an incredibly stressful job.

It’s much the same for Twitter with a lower number of censors, of course. Bad as Twitter has been—and it has been very bad (i.e., blocking reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop)—Facebook is even worse, just because of its remarkable reach.

Can Musk buy Facebook too?

And Google, while he’s at it, whose reach is greater still with its famous hidden algorithms that, through the ordering of links, exercise more subconscious thought control over world opinion than anything yet devised.

Maybe Oracle’s Larry Ellison, another billionaire with a modicum of free speech leanings, could buy one of them. We all know these guys are competitive.

As Musk’s deal approached closing today, lefties on Twitter erupted with #RIPTwitter and #DeleteTwitter trending, according to Fox.

I wouldn’t know. I had been off Twitter for several years, long before the Hunter Biden censorship. I had, on occasion, advised fellow conservatives to get off Twitter themselves, to stop sleeping with the enemy, and bankrupt the pernicious website.

Few, if any, did. Now, things are different. Or we hope they will be.

Should I go back?

Irrespective of its evident political bias, I had compared Twitter, and social media in general, to a form of online crack. We had to go back and back and back, even though we knew it wasn’t good for us, and that our time was better spent reading a book or even taking a walk.

That conundrum remains, even if Twitter becomes the town square that Musk envisions.

And what of Donald Trump? Should he return to the network that so famously excommunicated him while still giving public space to the likes of Ayatollah Khamenei?

If he does return, how would that affect his own burgeoning Truth Social?

Not simple, is it?

Nevertheless, thinking it through just a bit more, I have to relent and say, at least for now, a full-throated three cheers—not two and a half—for Elon Musk.

He has moved a moribund world forward. Facebook next?

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.



Source link

(Visited 6 times, 1 visits today)
GLA NEWS
WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com