WaPo and others react to Elon Musk being added to the Twitter board of directors?

Hot take in the Bezos-owned WaPo about need to prevent rich people from controlling media cracks up Elon Musk

“Twitter made strides to remove hate and harassment and to give users more control over how they share their opinions… It added features that let users limit who could reply to their tweets, created labels for misleading content and banned President Donald Trump’s account. After all that, bringing Musk onto the board seems like a big step backward,” Pao wrote. “He can bend the company toward his preferences, removing reasonable policies on hateful speech and urging people who are harassed to have thicker skins.”

She continued, “Musk’s appointment to Twitter’s board shows that we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication. For starters, we need consistent definitions of harassment and of content that violates personal privacy. Most companies, I suspect, would welcome such regulations… If platforms continue to push for growth at all costs — without such regulations — people will continue to be harmed. The people harmed will disproportionately be those who have been harmed for centuries — women and members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The people who benefit from unrestricted amplification of their views will also be the same people who have benefited from that privilege for centuries.” 

So the left is having a complete meltdown over the fact that Elon Musk bought up three billion worth of Twitter and now owns over three times the controlling interest of the last President and CEO of Twitter. 

The problem is that while the left loves their own rich people (Zuckerberg, Dorsey, etc) controlling these platforms because they are liberals and love to censor conservative political views and even inconvenient facts (Hunter Biden's laptop, Covid studies that defied CDC opinion, etc), they are worried that Elon Musk could become involved enough to (gasp) make the platform open again for all political viewpoints, rather than just the politically correct twitter approved viewpoints. 

As someone who experienced a loss of about 40% of my twitter following after the election of Joe Biden and being able to look at the suspended accounts that were eventually banned, literally none of the hundreds I probably looked at had anything harassing or hateful. Nearly all of them were suspended and eventually banned for pushing (what we now know are being proved to be factual) claims of election manipulation and in some cases out and out fraud. Twitter decided (as did much of the MSM) that people who questioned the election were part of QAnon and therefore they needed to be silenced.

To begin with there is a large difference between someone who believes that Democrats are closet cannibals and those who feel that the 2020 election was riddled with cheating and fraud. The former concept sports less than 1% of the entire population, while the latter is over half the American population according to a March 2022 poll. You cannot choose to declare a majority opinion (that has facts, stats, and even court rulings that back it) disinformation, just because the members of the Twitter fact-checking community has their heads up their own asses. 

The reality is that when your own media is supportive of censoring political opinions that they do not agree with, then you no longer have a media. You have a media state that wants to control information. The problem is that in 2022 without "full control" you literally have "no control" because people will just ignore you. While it is hard to "ignore" platforms like twitter or facebook, it can be done as it pertains to politics. When you decide to segregate your opinions (which is all that censoring actually does) then you end up with opposing groups of people who are getting entirely different opposing news and opinions and there is no place for anyone to come together. 

Coming together and discussing (or even arguing emotionally) charged political issues is what Twitter used to be about. Now it is about protecting the crybaby snowflake liberals who feel threatened and harrassed by the mere inclusion of any opposing opinions. Sorry crybaby snowflakes, but perhaps it is you that needs to go away and find your own safe place. Leave public forums to the public.