Elon Musk continues to dish dirt on Twitter, and on Wednesday he confirmed something many have been saying for years. Namely, the social media company has been purposely interfering in elections, attempting to push a specific outcome.
If you were following politics way back in early 2021, you may remember a story that broke (click here to read my write-up on it) describing a “secret cabal” that colluded to rig the outcome of the 2020 election. Here’s how TIME described it.
Wat https://t.co/GiKXiWGduD pic.twitter.com/h0Z9yrPETf
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 5, 2021
The key phrase there in regard to Twitter is the attempt to “steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” That’s exactly what was happening until Musk’s takeover, and he seems keen to expose everything the old regime did.
Holy smokes! Elon confirms that Twitter interfered in elections pic.twitter.com/JBTQsGhfgD
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 30, 2022
There are more examples of Twitter putting its thumb on the scale than one can reasonably keep track of. Obviously, its policy against COVID-19 “misinformation” was a big source of bias until Musk put a stop to it recently. Still, nothing touches what social media companies did with the Hunter Biden story. Even today, it’s astounding to think back to just how far they went to suppress what was obviously true information in order to benefit Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
What was even the thinking back then as far as justification goes? That all the crazy pictures of Hunter Biden were photoshopped? That the trove of emails containing lots of evidence of corruption were all faked? That the computer shop that had the laptop and Hunter Biden’s signature on an intake form was actually part of some vast rightwing conspiracy? You didn’t even need a deep forensic study to know the laptop was real, yet it was treated as Russian “disinformation” by Twitter and the wider information sphere anyway.
In the end, Donald Trump lost by just tens of thousands of votes in three states. What would have happened if there was actually a week-long onslaught in the media over the laptop instead of the story being suppressed? We’ll never know for sure, but for my money, that entire ordeal was the clearest evidence of the cycle that the election was “rigged.” If you can control the flow of information, you can control enough votes on the margins to reach a preferred outcome.
Musk is hated because he’s finally starting to break that monopoly. Twitter has been counted on for well over a decade to censor its content in order to benefit Democrats. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok may be bigger sites in terms of total use, but Twitter owns the political realm (outside of grannies sharing memes). The left has lost one of its biggest tools in the information wars, and it’s not going to go quietly. That’s why you are seeing advertiser boycotts and suggestions by Apple that it could remove Twitter from its app store. The battle is really just beginning.
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