Indian media has largely avoided the coverage of TwitterFiles. This relates to six tranches of information that Elon Musk released last week. These show the collusion of Twitter employees before Elon Musk’s take over of the platform with the US/Biden government and agencies like the FBI and the medical establishment to suppress or shadow-ban tweets that went against what they perceived as their interests.
The suppression of some of Donald Trump’s tweets toward the end of his presidency and his being banned from Twitter until Musk lifted it last month were two of the more prominent examples of Twitter’s collusion with the government. There have been hundreds more.
If one believes people like Trump need to be reined in, and many progressives on the payroll of Twitter did, then we must ask ourselves what gives us that right. And why should someone else, in some other situation, not censor us?
The TwitterFiles were released by Musk last weekend to independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Both have been critical of the woke policies of media houses like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Weiss, who was once on the NYT staff, resigned from her post on account of bullying by her liberal colleagues.
In a recent tweet, Weiss said: “A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”
The blacklist included, among others, Stanford University’s anti-Covid lockdown advocate Dr Jay Bhattacharya. He was shadowbanned and his visibility was filtered for holding and propagating views of public health during the Covid time when the government was following the directions of Dr Anthony Fauci. Of late, Musk has been campaigning to prosecute him for ‘faulty’ Covid policies.
One of the first things Musk did when he took over Twitter was to fire the ‘liberal’ CEO Parag Agrawal, and we Indians had wondered why remember? Such a nice boy from Ajmer, too. One of Agrawal’s first speeches after taking over Twitter was about how it is not about free speech, but about who can be heard. Clearly, he had a brief, though none of us could make much of it then.
But, say, had Musk said the same, we would have brought out our guns. We presume all capitalists must be free speech lovers. Along comes Musk, a self-confessed free-speech absolutist, and suddenly, we have problems because we had all along thought we were free speech. And that free speech was the bane of capitalism—how things change.
This reminds me of the conservative joke now doing the rounds in the Twitter world, from the handle of the politician, Larry Elder, a right-wing (African-American) political commentator and a talk radio host: “If Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung and Elon Musk were walking down the street, and you gave an American lefty a gun with two bullets—he’d put both in Elon Musk.” To which Musk tweeted, “And miss both times.”
Naturally, neither the mainstream liberal US media nor the equally self-righteous press in India or elsewhere has given much space for the coverage of the 'TwitterFiles'. That Musk chose independent journalists to release information shows the conscience and future of free speech is not corporate media but individuals.
Musk himself is coming across as an evolving personality. Last week he suspended the accounts of several journalists critical of him; he cancelled the account of one man who was obsessively tracking and outing the location of his private jet, which meant security problems for him and his family; then, as with the journalists, so with the stalker, he put the decision to the polls on his platform. As more than 50% of the pollsters voted to cancel the cancellation, he revived the accounts.
These seem like democratic measures. But in effect, Musk is becoming a royalty of sorts. There is not much difference between the ancient Roman emperors who asked the crowd to vote with their thumbs if a gladiator should be killed or not.
In effect, the Twitter polls are coming down to a kind of absolute majoritarianism arbitrated by a very wealthy man. Soon polls on Facebook, Google, and other privately owned public platforms can and will choose to run proxy governments, and the writ of an elected Parliament or Senate would be of little effect. Already, major corporate/political decisions are being taken on the strength of the polls. For example, Musk ran another poll in the early hours of Monday: “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.” (I voted no. It is so much fun with Musk as CEO.)
We may think Musk’s polls are a way of respecting majority decisions. If you apply this principle to India, minorities would be in trouble, for example. Indian media feeds and flourishes on the information. Yet there has not been a single sustained debate on what is happening to the idea of information and related technology and where they are headed.
Musk has shown how a liberal media platform worked toward its idea of free speech. And it does not look too good.
Pretty much would be the case with Facebook or Google if their cupboards were opened. Much of that applies to Indian news outlets.
2022 is ending. But our problems with information technology and free speech are just beginning. And, if nothing else, the issues here deserve sustained attention because the closest we have come to the soul wherein these times is social media.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B