It’s not the Onion. It’s not even surprising. It is, however, nuts.
To what does the absurd delusion relate? Twitter. Or to be more precise, Twitter’s decision to eliminate all mention of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Matt Taibbi tells the story in a twitstream of how internal Twitter emails show that it was a deliberate, unprincipled, choice by Twitter to eradicate this story from its site. This might have been at the behest of the Biden campaign, but the choice belonged entirely to Twitter. And Twitter had the right to do so.
This was no mystery, even at the time it happened. The Post, a conservative tabloid that tended to go off the edge of reason and reality on occasion, was nonetheless a longstanding newspaper and wrote about something it deemed newsworthy. That the story couldn’t be posted on Twitter did not somehow magically escape notice. Everybody knew about it at the time. While we’re not learning a bit more about the why, so what? Twitter favored the Dems? And the New York Post didn’t. Is anyone surprised about this?
Taibbi raises very real and serious questions about how social media functions, given how many people believe that it is the new public square or a trusted source of news. It mostly is. It isn’t always. The usual suspects were outraged at Taibbi for being Elon Musk’s “shill.”
Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world. Humiliating shit.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) December 2, 2022
Would NBC’s senior reporter Ben Collins not have reported the internal Twitter emails? Probably not, but it wouldn’t have much to do with PR work for Musk, but the depth of his personal bias and “moral clarity.”
But what is buried below the pissing match of “journalists” for whom politics transcends fact, wherever they’re sourced, is the power of the Twitters. The story of Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t concealed from view, but prominent at the New York Post. It was there to be read. It was there. No one prevented any other newspaper from running with the story other than their own decision not to do so, Why wasn’t it on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal?
Granted, Trump’s absurd shriek that this “big tech” decision to deep six a story that might have helped him was so monumentally important that the entirety of the election was now undermined by fraud, reflects his laughable grasping at the thinnest of straws to salvage what ego remains following his humiliating defeat. But that the rest of us should be aware that Twitter can, and did, play such games with the news matters.
What Taibbi’s written neither proves that government coerced Twitter to censor the Post nor taints Joe Biden. That it shows bias by Twitter seems quite clear, but so what? Twitter is under no duty to be fair or promote any political view or politician it chooses not to. And while there may be internal debates over whether it comports with policy or has any credible or principled basis, that doesn’t change its right to do it because Jack says so.
What can be taken away is the recognition that social media such as Twitter isn’t our public square, our free and fair news source. And despite Musk’s protestations, it likely won’t be any more trustworthy under him than under Jack Dorsey. No matter how badly you believe it should be subject to constraints based on your personal flavor or fairness, you’re legally and constitutionally wrong, and don’t get to dictate its internal choices unless you’ve got more than $44 billion to burn.
One other takeaway is how many place the blame on Matt Taibbi for telling this story about what Twitter did internally because it hurts their tribe. Humiliating shit, indeed.
And the final takeaway is that Trump’s downward spiral is continuing apace. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
As much as I hope for Il Douche’s, continued and complete, self immolation and feel the urge to chant “Burn, baby, burn!”, with all due respect to our esteemed host, I fear this is a FAR more serious/ egregious issue than his writing acknowledges.
I live in VT, essentially a “blue bubble”. There tens of millions of people who live in “red bubbles”, where they don’t know anyone who admits to voting for anyone other than Il Douche. I suspect that if I, or most others here in the hotel bar, were in similar circumstances we’d question the election results, despite the paucity of evidence to support Il Douche’s claim of widespread fraud. Many/ most of these same people have seen decades of wage/ income stagnation, and fear being disenfranchised.
Where I see Rhodes and Meggs convictions for seditious conspiracy as a clear warning of the dangers of supporting the Big Lie, Il Douche feels compelled to double down as he hopes to escape conviction himself. Unfortunately, the audience of people whose “lived experience” seems to support his contentions is quite large and they feel terribly aggrieved.
I fear that those of us who live outside some of the places where Il Douche won overwhelmingly fail to appreciate the depths of their feelings. If this demented/ delusional demagogue takes the next step and actually calls for some sort of violent resistance, the number of people who might respond is alarming.
To my mind Taibbi, Twitter, and Truth Social are a sideshow/ distraction and the concern should be Il Douche actually calling for violent insurrection.
OTOH, I may be paranoid or need to switch to decaf.
I’m going to vote for mild but necessary paranoia.
Being a happy resident of a red bubble, roughly 78% support for all republican candidates across the board, your description of us is spot on right up to the part about violent insurrection. I voted for Trump because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. I voted for Trump again because he wasn’t Joe Biden. Simple as that. I will stipulate that you folks in NYC have a much longer association with and likely a better informed opinion of Trump, but to me he seems to be an odd but common combination of boorish, devious and affable. I’ve know politicians from county commissioners to governors who also handily fit that description.
What I and my peers liked about the Trump administration was not the personality of the man at the top but what we saw as the on the ground effects of the policies of that administration. None of us knew for sure who actually developed those policies. Unbiased and intelligent press coverage of the Trump administration might have ferreted out that information and possibly reduced Trump’s personal standing in our eyes but all we got was Russia, Russia, Russia. So we pinned our hopes on the guy at the top.
Personal moral authority of a displaced politician, likely misplaced moral authority, ends well before calling for violent insurrection. Neither I nor anyone in my conservative circle are going there. Are there individuals who would. Sure. Are they very much the fringe. Yes. Would their attempt be decisively crushed by local and federal police forces should those forces be directed to do so. Of course.
Like the Ayatollah and his morality police or the Chairman and his white-suited Covid response teams, wild swings into policies that deeply offend or impoverish the vast majority of a population result first in massive non-compliance then insurrection if non-compliance proves futile. Whoever is at the top of the political structure of the time reaps the benefits or opprobrium depending on how that insurrection turns out.
That’s how we came to be Americans.
“Why wasn’t it on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal?”
That is, indeed, the question. Is there a good* reason they refused to run a story implicating a Presidential candidate in a network of bribery by foreign governments? Would a claim by former intelligence operatives (not known for being especially truthful) that it might be Russian disinformation, when such claim is accompanied by a statement that they have no evidence of this, count? I tend to think not, but I suppose reasonable minds can differ.
*For purposes of discussion, a “good” reason does not include a desired outcome in the election.
All other noise, hypocrisy and stupidity in response to this story aside, let’s just have the headline here be “Trump Calls For Termination Of Constitution.”
“The Founders believed the Constitution should be nullified if political parties even appear to collude with journalists and publishers to tell lies or suppress stories during an election” is a novel originalist legal theory, one that could only come from that great legal scholar Donald Trump. I’m sure no electoral skullduggery happened during the Founders’ time.
And if anyone didn’t know Trump is in a downward spiral, he just called for termination of the constitution in Truth social post.
Did you read the post, Ray?
Read the post,but could not see the Trump text. My iPad didn’t bring g it up, it was a blank space my iPhone brought it up however. At least I could I Fer your meaning. That something at least
Why is Trump still relevant? Because people continue to write and talk about him. And who is it, that is kindly giving Trump the life-giving publicity that he needs, to remain relevant and interesting to the general public? Is it Trump-lovers? Is Tucker Carlson promoting Trump on his evening show? Is the New York Post praising him and exhorting their audience to vote for him in 2024? Is the Wall Street Journal writing approving editorials about the wonderful policies that his new administration will enact? No. It is the so-called Trump-haters who are keeping his dream alive. People are paying attention to Trump because people who should know better can’t resist writing or saying “Look at the latest crazy thing that Trump said!”
If you love Trump, or if you hate him, you are falling for his schtick. Carnival barkers don’t care whether you love them or hate them, they just want you to enter the tent. The Trump-lovers have mostly given up on him. Without the haters, the show would be over.
I’m not complaining; I love a good circus. Trump took Rush’s “Love me or hate me, but you can’t look away” routine and refined it into an art form. Thank you for keeping the show alive!
Progressives desperately need Trump and his band of blithering idiots, without whom they may not get to reimagine America.
Scott wrote: “Or to be more precise, Twitter’s decision to eliminate all mention of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.” If that was their decision it was not implemented very well. Twitter allows searches like: post hunter laptop until:2020-10-24 since:2020-10-14
And plenty of tweets come up.
I understand that this does not address the wisdom of their decision.
The problem with the actions of Twitter is that it censored something of significance, not because it was false but because it was true.
That is, they considered that any lie to defeat Donald Trump was a good lie and that the public was too dopey to be allowed to hear the truth.
The public was entitled to hear the truth. There are no good lies, just good liars.