It's time to cut the crap.
From Tablet Magazine, May 6:
The Democratic activist troika fighting his Twitter acquisition has identified a new front in the battle to turn American life into a perpetual partisan apocalypse
Elon Musk’s maybe-impending purchase of Twitter is being treated not as a mere business acquisition but as a kind of twilight battle over the fate of the American experiment. Maybe there was a time when hypothetical and probably minor changes to the terms of service of a social networking website could be seen as an eminently survivable event, without any larger implications for long-established rights and customs like free speech. But those days are gone now, as evidenced by yet another high-profile, strong-arm effort by a weirdly open combination of private and public powers acting in unison to taint or scuttle the Twitter sale.
On May 3, a trio of so-called “advocacacy groups” sent a letter to Twitter’s major corporate advertisers, including image-conscious and regulation-sensitive heavyweights like Coca-Cola and Disney, urging them to pull their business from Twitter if Musk proves unwilling to censor speech on the platform to those organizations’ satisfaction. “Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety,” began the missive, distributed under the letterhead of Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and UltraViolet, and co-signed by another two dozen groups, including the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and NARAL Pro-Choice America. These groups are promising to mobilize their activists, and whatever other resources they might have, to punish companies that will stick by Twitter if it junks its pre-Musk content moderation regime. The pitch was a simple one: Nice store you got there. It would be a shame if someone threw a rock through your window.
Musk seemed to take the not-so-subtle threats of brand damage and possible federal regulation as a challenge. “Who funds these organizations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate …” Musk suggested on Twitter. But while the question showed moxie, its scope was also clearly too limited. Better to ask: What function do these “advocacy groups” serve? And for whom?
Media Matters for America, Accountable Tech, and UltraViolet are all led by former senior Democratic staffers in Congress, the executive branch, and major political campaigns. They all receive funding from liberal foundations that donate widely to Democrats, or from advocacy organizations, like labor unions, that are deeply involved in Democratic Party politics. All three are creatures of the broader Democratic Party apparatus. They are the party’s attack arm.
There is nothing automatically wrong with the public-private vertical representing one side of the American political duopoly deciding to treat the takeover of a web platform popular with journalists and other people with master’s degrees as if it’s a high-stakes special election in a purple congressional district. But the letter, and the work of its three main sponsors, still reveals the application of political campaign-type tactics, organization, and rhetoric to an ever-expanding and potentially unlimited variety of contexts. Welcome to the world of fully automated political warfare, about everything, all the time.....
....MUCH MORE
Also at Tablet:
