In an episode of Blue Bloods, fictitious New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan said, “Freedom of the press only applies to people who own one,” and, in a lot of ways, he’s right. The New York Times and The Washington Post went to court in 1971 to fight President Richard Nixon’s attempts to prevent publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers, winning their case in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
Many people regard the issue of Twitter having been bought by Elon Musk as a matter of freedom of speech; I view it more as a matter of freedom of the press. You can say anything you want, but no one else is somehow obligated to repeat it, or publish it. For umpteen years people have submitted articles and other things to the Times and National Review and Simon & Schuster, and had their articles or books not accepted for publication. The editors at those companies were exercising a ‘gatekeeping’ function, and using their presses to print what they decided they wished to print, even if the authors of the rejected pieces thought differently.
And yes, I have — at least in memory; I didn’t keep them — a small collection of rejection letters myself. But my late best friend and I knew, in advance, that we were entrusting our submissions to the judgement of those who owned the presses in which we sought to get published.
This internet thingy that Al Gore invented changed all of that. Rush Limbaugh made the first crack, when he got his radio show syndicated, to the absolute horror of many on the left. Internet chat rooms on America Online widened things a bit, but the real break came when independent people could start their own websites, and Powerline and Little Green Footballs exposed CBS News use of forged documents to try to defeat the younger President Bush’s re-election in 2004.
And in the end, Twitter, and the other social media sites, are publishers, able to choose what, and what not, to publish.
Now comes Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, who writes about issues affecting women and social media. Dr Alaimo, it seems, does not much like it when the wrong people who own presses get to decide what does, and does not get published.
Opinion by Kara Alaimo | Friday, December 16, 2022 | 7:20 PM EST
CNN – On Thursday, Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter entered a terrifying new phase when he began wielding his power to censor the press. The Twitter accounts of several journalists who have covered Musk critically recently — in other words, done their jobs — were suspended.In tweets, Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy against doxing — or posting private information online — by sharing his “exact real-time” location. But none of the banished reporters — including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell — appeared to have done so. Musk and Twitter didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
Well, we already knew that Dr Alaimo had no problem at all with Taylor Lorenz’s doxxing of Chaya Raichik, the creator of Libs of TikTok, calling it accountability even while she stated that “Doxxing can be dangerous — or even deadly. There are many people who should be able to share information anonymously online.” It’s almost as though the professor believes that the acceptability of doxxing is determined by the political views of the victim.
It was yesterday’s news that Twitter had suspended the journolists in question; by the next day, Twitter announced the restoration of those accounts.
Now I don’t know: was this all part of Mr Musk’s master plan to teach those journolists a lesson, that what they celebrated when Donald Trump and some prominent conservatives were suspended by the previous Twitter management could happen to them as well, or was Twitter responding to the negative publicity for having done so?
If it weren’t obvious before, the latest moves make clear that Musk tends to run this company the way dictators run their states: by making decisions that serve his personal interests rather than those of the public, and capriciously getting rid of people who stand in his way. That’s why tech workers and journalists who have lost their jobs in the past few weeks should come together to create non-profit social networks designed to serve the public interest.
“The way dictators run their states”? Dr Alaimo didn’t quite go full Godwin’s Law and proclaim that Mr Musk is “literally Hitler,” but she was certainly hovering around that button. Twitter, as a publisher, was exercising its freedom of the press to not grant publication to a few reporters. Her OpEd, published on cnn.com, was certainly taking advantage of CNN’s freedom of the press!
And Dr Alaimo really, really doesn’t like freedom of the press when the wrong people own those presses, or are the one’s taking decisions about whose words they will publish:
Opinion by Kara Alaimo | Tuesday, October 18, 2022 | Updated 8:12 AM EDT
CNN — The conservative social media company Parler announced on Monday that it is being purchased by Kanye West, who was temporarily suspended from Twitter this month for an antisemitic tweet. A statement from Parler’s parent company announcing the deal described West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, as having taken “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space” where “he will never have to fear being removed from social media again.”
In a release by Parler, West said that “in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”
This development means several social media companies could soon be left in the hands of mercurial, mega-rich men who have pledged to promote “free speech,” including the kind of extreme views that got West temporarily booted from Twitter. Elon Musk is currently in the process of buying Twitter, though Twitter said in a recent court filing that federal authorities (it was not clear which ones) are investigating Musk (while Musk’s attorney said this filing was designed to distract from Twitter’s own legal issues).
For his part, Musk has said Twitter should be “an inclusive arena for free speech.” And former President Donald Trump, who was thrown off Twitter and Facebook in January 2021, founded the company that created Truth Social, which describes itself as a “free speech haven.”
If West and Musk go through with their deals, these three social media platforms are likely to serve as ecosystems for conservative thought. This will likely make the views of those who remain on them more extreme — which could have a radical effect on our politics. That’s because when people who think similarly come together, they reaffirm and heighten one another’s initial beliefs.
So, if that’s what Dr Alaimo believes — and I certainly take her at her word — “ecosystems for conservative thought” are bad, bad things. On Twitter, at the time under the previous ownership, would have been an ‘ecosystem for liberal thought,’ with conservatives allowed, as long as
they followed the
left’s rules. I have
already noted that I have had to be careful in tweets, especially when it came to
my reporting about Will Thomas, a male swimmer who claimed to be a woman named “Lia,” including calling him ‘Lia’ Thomas in
a couple of
article titles to get past Twitter’s rules, even though I do not accept the cockamamie notion that anyone can change his sex.
While men such as West, Musk and Trump claim to promote free speech by not favoring the moderation of problematic content, here’s what lack of moderation really does: It drives away the people victimized by abusive content such as West’s tweet.
“Victimized,” huh? Apparently to Dr Alaimo, it’s not just sticks and stones which can break people’s bones, but names most certainly can hurt them!
As much as I’d like to quote all of Dr Alaimo’s OpEd piece, I’ll summarize much of the rest. She stated that Twitter really is a digital “town square,” and that while slightly less than a quarter of Americans have Twitter accounts, it does have an “outsize influence” on what reporters write and talk about, and thus is very, very important, and journolists journalists must be able to hold people in power accountable. Social media, Dr Alaimo stated, must be a place where the public can find “reliable information,” decrying what she saw as hate speech and misinformation.
It’s clear that we can’t rely on Musk’s Twitter to provide a safe, open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. And many of the people who have these skills have just been laid off from their jobs. In addition to the mass exodus from Twitter since Musk’s takeover, there have been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies lately, including Facebook and CNN, with more coming at The Washington Post. Some of these professionals should work together to create new social platforms designed to provide the truly open town hall we so desperately need.
So, a “truly open town hall” must be one in which conservatives are censored, but not liberals, in which conservatives can be doxxed, but not leftists.
Musk’s latest power moves are nothing short of dangerous. Recently unemployed tech and journalism workers should take them as a rallying call to unite to create new, healthier online spaces. We have nothing to lose except our dependence on a mercurial, egotistical czar to set the terms of our public debates.
The creation of Parler and Truth Social were mocked by the left, and none of the alternate sites gained anywhere near the size and influence of Twitter. Governments ar all levels use Twitter to convey information to the public, but if any government has a Parler account, I’ve not heard of it.
Now Twitter has been taken over by a man whose ideas of what should and should not be published are different from the left, and the libs are aghast. Really, Dr Alaimo, names really cannot hurt you . . . unless you are weak-willed enough to let them.
Miss Lorenz previously told us that she was immunocompromised, though I have included that link to show that I once saw it; she has since deleted it. Thus, the image of one of her latest threads is just that, a screen captured image. Of course, it had to be screen capped because Miss Lorenz, who has her tweets protected and limited to her “approved followers” — Miss Lorenz has, as of this writing, 355,400 followers, but she follows only 8,674 people — both restricts those who can reply to it and set it so that her tweet cannot be retweeted. It is interesting that someone with the blue checkmark of being a high-profile person, who has the major public soapbox of a Washington Post reporter, and believed that Chaya Raichik needed to be doxed, has her tweets protected.
