Social Media At War With Itself
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/elon-musk-far-right.html?searchResultPosition=1
I do not use Facebook. Or Instagram, or Tik Tok, and certainly not X (formerly Twitter).
However, millions of people do and that’s why social media matters. It’s a new way to communicate that has, as its supporters claim, far fewer limits on who can say what than traditional mainstream media.
Apparently, if I understand this, when Elon Musk bought Twitter and changed its name to X, he allowed back on the platform a host of people, most from the right wing, who had been excluded in the past for things they had said on Twitter. My understanding of this from those who know is that Elon was expanding free speech and that was a good thing.
Flash forward to the article above from The New York Times on January 10. Guess what? People are being excluded from X yet again. The far, far right (Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon) are not happy with Elon’s influence on Mr. Trump and Elon’s having restricted access to some far-right commentators on X all over again. Free speech? Not exactly.
It appears that Elon has an ego like everyone else and does not appreciate being criticized on his own social media platform. And, what’s even more humorous, Mr. Musk has taken to supporting some of the far-right parties in Europe most notably the AfD, the Alternative for Germany, a far right, anti-immigrant party accused of connections to neo-Nazis. This next point is humorous also. Elon supports the use of H-1B visas to bring highly skilled foreign workers into the United States Immigration is OK as long as Elon decides which immigrants are good immigrants. So, he supports anti-immigrant policies except as they pertain to workers he needs.
I think you get my drift. It seems the right wing is just as confused as the left wing as to what it believes in depending on the personal interest of the prominent members of the right wing.
Let’s go a bit further. Apparently, there is also a fight over who gets a check mark on his or her X account. A check mark is what “X users pay for so their accounts can get increased engagement and, in some cases so they can receive a share of ad revenue.”
Now since I am not an X user, this all doesn’t mean much to me. But it does seem to matter to those whose accounts have been closed, opened, or unchecked by forces at X, assumed to be Mr. Musk.
So much for free speech and the equalizing power of social media.
I am one of those people who believe social media is a blight on the country and the world. It allows any idiot to say whatever he or she thinks and automatically gives it agency and equality with what truly learned people think. Of course, there is always Woody Allen’s quote from Manhattan when he is speaking to the affected Diane Keaton character:
“You know a lot of geniuses, y’know. You should meet some stupid people once in a while, y’know, you could learn something.”
I have no interest with the war on X over who can say what and who can cancel whom. This all seems like high school nonsense to me, but the world itself seems like it went back to high school and the class president is the Joker himself.
Most likely to succeed? Elon wins.
