How (and why) they sell X as a “bastion of free speech”

Source : off-guardian.org – August 22, 2024 – Kit Knigthly

https://off-guardian.org/2024/08/22/how-and-why-they-sell-x-as-a-bastion-of-free-speech/

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Donald Trump is back on the app formerly known as Twitter. After almost four years in the “Truth Social” wilderness he sat down with Elon Musk for a 3-hour conversation.

On our side of the pond, Musk is taking every opportunity he can to troll Keir Starmer’s government, comparing the UK to something from 1984 (accurately, it must be said).

During the Olympics, he chimed in with criticism of controversial Algerian boxer Imane Khelif for being a “man beating up women”.

Wherever there is controversy, Musk (or the PR intern running his X account) appears to pour fuel on the fire.

That’s not to say everything Musk says is wrong. A lot of it is right, or at least defensible and rational, but I think that itself is an integral part of the construction. Sugar among the salt, aiding in the sale of the overriding narrative:

“Elon Musk – the world’s richest man, and Free Speech Champion”.

(subtext – there are some oligarchs you can really trust)

How did it come to this? And Why?

To give you my answer  to that, let’s go back in time a few years B.E. – Before Elon.

Under the ancien régime, Twitter purged the alt-news crowd, labelled provably real people as bots, and told dissenters “If you don’t like it, go and start your own platform”.

The trouble with that was…that’s exactly what they did. Newer smaller versions of Twitter began to appear –  Truth Social and Gab and so on and so on.

And when you’re an all-encompassing supranational corporate-governmental monster addicted to surveillance and control…that’s kinda counterproductive, because now you can’t hear what’s being said, and you can’t steer the conversation.

What is the point of spending billions creating a massive surveillance network if you keep banning all the people you want to surveil?

What good is it spending the budget of a medium-sized country on influencers, bots and shills, and then stopping people from seeing them?

No, banning doesn’t work, it just puts people outside your system of influence and control.

Outside the system is bad, they need everyone inside. They don’t care if you’re praising or criticising, loving or hating, defending its existence or denying it – everything is acceptable, as long as you do it where they can see you.

They needed to invite those banished souls back inside, and the most efficient way of doing that was to adapt the Red/Blue fake dichotomy model of elections to the world of social media.

In short, to bring the banned people back and patch over the hole they’d made, they needed to rehabilitate Twitter.

Enter Elon Musk, and “X”.

It’s all about creating a controlled opposition.

The contrived binary between the “good” social media platforms –  whose CEOs attend congressional hearings and simper about “social responsibility”  vs the “bad” social media platforms – whose CEOs post rude memes.

The “safe space” vs the “free-for-all” (or at least, the pretence of a free-for-all – but we’ll get to that).

From the moment Musk acquired Twitter, the rebrand was on.

Alternate media journalists were invited to inspect Twitter’s “top secret files” and came away with some “shocking” revelations, including:

• Twitter engaged in “visibility filtering” (aka shadow banning) and algorithmic censorship of anti-establishment people and opinions!
• Twitter enabled the Pentagon to operate sock puppet accounts for running psyops!
• National governments used to ask Twitter to remove stuff, and sometimes they did!

Phew! Who knew, right?

It always amazes me how much traction they get by simply telling people an incredibly watered-down version of what we already know. I guess because we are all so pathetically grateful to hear even a small amount of semi-truth coming from ‘official sources’.

But the Twitter files were just the start, further displays of overt ‘pro-free speech’ behaviour followed. Most recently including unbanning Trump and announcing the closure of X’s Brazil office rather than complying with government censorship.

All of this has contributed to the birth of a cult of personality around Elon as the supposed “champion of free expression”, with X itself labelled the “last bastion of free speech”.

In the wake of the so-called assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the rallying cry of the Musk worshippers was “thank God for X, or we’d never have known the truth”.

So you get memes like this…

The branding is clear: Musk is the people’s billionaire, the “pick me” mogul who’s “not like the other oligarchs”.

You don’t need me to explain how useful this dynamic is in controlling mass opinion. It’s creating organised religion for the atheist generation. Tenets of faith no different in purpose and far tackier in presentation.

Importantly we should ask: Has Twitter even really improved now that it’s “X”?

No it hasn’t. The “left-wing” Musk critics are right about that.

Maybe there is an increased amount of overt racism and race-baiting, or maybe now it’s just promoted. Either way, there’s no ignoring it.

What equally can’t be ignored is the massive proliferation of ads and porn bots and the same gifs and videos clogging every discussion. Monetisation has led to an avalanche of accounts farming engagement with blatant clickbait, ragebait, cutebait….just, all the bait.

All the while, these newly unpleasant facets of X are being brandished by the pro-censorship “left”, and used to discredit the very idea of free speech in general.

“See, absolute freedom of speech just means racism and porn”, they get to say, “We need more regulation!”

Now, there’s an argument that all the bait could be considered “the acceptable price of free speech”…

…if free speech was what we actually got.

But it’s not.

For some reason, since the “Twitter files” released and in combination with Musk’s unearned reputation as a “free speech absolutist”, people have assumed that Twitter – now X – no longer allows shadowbans, psy-ops or cooperates with government-backed censorship.

But they do. They very obviously do.

Case in point: OffG. We have a Twitter/X account with almost 61,000 followers.

Back when Twitter was Still Twitter  any link to our website was subject to an auto-warning that it might be potential spam. We were also intermittently shadowbanned, which had a very obvious effect on our reach, though our tweets could still get thousands of retweets and likes.

When Twitter became X the auto-warning was removed.

But our reach diminished –  massively.  We are now told all the time that people haven’t seen our tweets or links in years. A successful tweet of ours gets maybe 200 likes, most remain in double figures.

So, for our account at least, “uncensored” X is no kind of improvement.

CJ Hopkins (who has written about this psyop himself) was temporarily labelled a distributor of “adult content”, and hidden behind warnings, while dozens of OnlyFans girls can be found in almost any reply chain shilling their “wares”.

This is quite obvious “visibility filtering” in action, and all the truly anti-establishment thinkers are subject to it.

It’s all about “speech not reach”, ensuring all independent thought is quarantined off in its own little virtual “free speech cages”.

Instead of banning the voices they don’t want to speak, they lock them up in soundproof rooms where they can scream their lungs out, and only the FBI agents set to monitor them can hear, and only bots designed to control them will respond.

Now, clearly that’s preferable to going to prison for posting anti-immigrant memes, but should free speech really be graded on that curve?

Nevertheless, that’s the situation in which we find ourselves.

So, what we’re left with is two versions of “free speech” to choose from…neither of which is actual free speech.

The battle lines are drawn up and either you’re with the government or you’re with Elon Musk. An entirely fake a war between overt censorship and covert censorship.

They won’t allow a third way. Like everything else these days.