Commentator
#TwitterFiles, Involuntary Hospitalizations, Cienfuegos, DeSantis
THE TWITTER FILES - AND SUBSTACK’S BIG BREAK
I’ve really been trying to work out for myself what my publishing rhythm should be - particularly for these ‘Commentator’ posts. Essentially, I’m not really a political junkie - I think it’s important for everybody to think seriously about politics - but I really enjoy spending several days a week not thinking about politics at all and then diving back into it all at once to write these posts. In general, that’s the pattern I’d like to follow, but this week there seemed to be an unusually large number of stories that I wanted to write about so am doubling down on ‘Commentator.’ I’ve divided these into the stories that really matter - China protests, Iran protests, DoD spending, AI, and which are being comparatively underreported - and stories that are creating a firestorm online at the moment, that aren’t necessarily of such earth-shattering importance but are controversial and interesting.
The main story that fits that description this week is the ‘Twitter Files’ - Elon Musk’s dump of sensitive materials to a trio of independent journalists -
, , and .My two main thoughts really have nothing to do with the content of the materials. I have a sort of hometown pride that Musk selected Substackers Taibbi, Weiss, and Shellenberger as the journalists to pass the materials to. The three of them were well-known, credentialed journalists before Substack came around, but Substack has been their base, and the sense is that this really is a coming-of-age moment for Substack - a very prominent individual sitting on good journalistic material and deciding to blindside the entire mainstream media and hand it to the ‘Substack Three.’ And the mainstream media is, not surprisingly, livid about the story and reacting with the by-now-expected brew of dismissal and obfuscation. Forbes claims that the ‘Twitter Files’ offer “no bombshells” and are a “hyped-up exposé.” New York Magazine gets mouth-frothy contending that the pieces are “saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity.” And The New York Times attempts to walk the high road, insisting that the story is really no big deal at all - “It was, on the surface, a typical example of reporting the news” - and is all just a journalistic tempest-in-a-teapot that, on balance, shows no particular wrongdoing by Twitter’s old regime.
The other main thought is to just be staggered at how bad Twitter really is - and for reasons that have nothing to do with censorship or partisan control. Musk had released the files to the Substack Three on condition that they publish their stories first as Twitter threads - and the threads are almost impossible to read, the ranking algorithms constantly pushing the threads out of chronological order.
But anyway. The point is that - whatever The New York Times may say - this is a major story. It documents unequivocally the extent to which Twitter suppressed free speech (on a platform that is ostensibly all about free speech), manipulated the public conversation for partisan ends, denied that it was doing that manipulation, and somewhere in that process may well have tipped a presidential election.
The most trenchant of the four threads is Bari Weiss’ - which is on Twitter moderation policies in general and reveals that, on Twitter, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, ‘shadow banning’ was common practice. “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,” writes Weiss. And has the screenshots to prove it - ‘God mode’ screens revealing that Twitter employees curtailed the reach of popular conservative or ‘scientific freedom’ users by adding them to ‘Trends Blacklist,’ ‘Search Blacklist,’ and ‘Do Not Amplify’ lists. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” a Twitter engineer told the #TwitterFiles journalists.
That’s really the story that matters. As Tablet Magazine’s The Scroll puts it, “A new drop of Twitter Files from journalist Bari Weiss suggests that many of the acts of censorship that Twitter claimed not to be doing - which it was obviously doing - were in fact being done.” Twitter’s internal justification for this, apparently - this being core to the 21st century art of lying - was to vehemently reject the term ‘shadow ban’ while widely practicing ‘visibility filtering,’ which is, to anybody who’s not a Twitter exec, exactly the same thing. In 2018, Twitter’s Head of Legal Policy and Trust and Head of Product declared together, “We do not shadow ban. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” That seems to have been the line Jack Dorsey adhered to in his 2018 congressional testimony when he was asked if he “censored conservatives,” “censored people,” or “shadow-banned prominent Republicans” - to all three of which Dorsey answered “no.” But the Congressmen did not know (!) that Dorsey had his fingers crossed under the table and that ‘visibility filtering’ had nothing at all to do with ‘censorship’ or ‘shadow banning.’
This is of course something that the free and fair press, both mainstream media outlets and independent, should be upset about. The underlying issue - as Dorsey himself was well aware - is that Twitter is doing the work of a public utility but is a private company, subject to the political biases of its staff and to external political pressures. Shellenberger notes that “In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to Democrats” and Taibbi reports that, over time, political pressures from Democratic leaders strongly influenced Twitter’s moderation policies. “By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine,” Taibbi writes. “One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’” The solution in the old Progressive model would be to nationalize - engage in anti-trust, create some sort of politically neutral entity, like the FCC, that would aim to create fair public parameters within Twitter. But, for a variety of reasons, that hasn’t been in the cards and instead we have this odd political see-saw - the old Twitter regime doing hatchet work for the Democrats (and overplaying its hand) and now Elon Musk attempting to turn Twitter into libertarian paradise.
The two stories that are getting the most attention at the moment - Hunter Biden’s laptop and the rescinding of Donald Trump’s Twitter privileges - are in a sense just test cases demonstrating the clear ideological bent of Twitter’s ostensibly neutral content moderation. The New York Times, writing of Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden story, harrumphed, “Many others - even some ardent Twitter critics - were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a laptop that appeared to be Hunter Biden’s.”
But that’s not at all what the ‘Twitter Files’ show. They reveal partisan-driven Twitter executives desperate to keep The New York Post’s Hunter Biden story from serving as an October surprise; and then hunting for justifications to strip away the free expression of a sitting U.S. President. As Taibbi writes of the response to the New York Post’s piece, “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.” And, again, there are the screenshots to back this up - among others, Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth saying that the ‘unsafe’ designation was a pretty threadbare argument that is “not ideal but [is] the only thing we have.”
So. Look. There’s an odd bedfellows-ishness about the whole enterprise of the #TwitterFiles. How much do the Substack Three really care about The New York Post’s Hunter Biden piece or about Trump’s having retained access to his Twitter account in the aftermath of January 6th? Not sure. For me, certainly, giving Donald Trump his Twitter account back would be very low on my King-For-A-Day priorities list. And I am sympathetic to Roth et al who - it could be argued - in the exigent circumstances of the President of the United States attacking his own Congress did the patriotic thing by forgetting, for the moment, about Twitter’s founding corporate principles.
But the #TwitterFiles are more about recurrent practices as opposed to ‘one-off’ crisis moments. It’s completely clear - as it was before the files dump - that Democratic lawmakers had a too-cozy relationship with Twitter. Ultimately, that relationship benefitted no one. In particular, it fueled the rage of conservatives who felt that they were being excluded from the democratic process….for the good reason that they were being excluded from the democratic process. And it resulted in the chain-of-events that led to Dorsey, who had been blindsided by his own company, suggesting to Musk that Musk take over Twitter - and with the result that Musk has thrown out the old regime, and now really thrown them under the bus, and is taking Twitter in a libertarian direction that was exactly what the Twitterites in the liberal era were most nervous about.
The most interesting exchange revealed by the #TwitterFiles is Ro Khanna and the Congressional Democrats trying to intercede with Twitter and to get them to change their moderation policies and the perception of bias. As Taibbi acidly writes, the main concern of Congressional Democrats was that Twitter moderate more, not less, so that the occasional heavy-handed censorship of a conservative-favorable story like The New York Post piece would stick out less. “In their mind, social media doesn’t moderate harmful content so when it does, like it did [with the Hunter Biden piece], it becomes a story,” wrote consultant Carl Szabo of Congressional Democrats’ reaction to the Hunter Biden story suppression. “If the companies moderated more, conservative wouldn’t even think to use social media for disinformation, misinformation, or otherwise.”
Ro Khanna was a bit more enlightened and attempted to educate Twitter on the basics of the First Amendment (which seems to have been lost in the gobbledygook of their own corporate policies). “This seems a violation of the 1st Amendment principles,” Khanna wrote, also in response to the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. “The story has now become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails and it’s become a bigger deal than it would have been….In the heat of a Presidential campaign, restricting dissemination of newspaper articles (even if NY Post is far right) seems like it will invite more backlash than it will do good.” And Carl Szabo, Twitter’s consultant on Capitol Hill, reported back that Democrats vowed the Hunter Biden laptop story as ‘tech’s Access Hollywood moment” and that “tech is screwed and rightfully so.”
As far as I can tell, that prophecy has been almost perfectly fulfilled by Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the end of the liberal-tilted moderation regime of the late 2010s. What’s ironic is that it was elected Democratic officials like Khanna who spotted the danger more clearly than hyper-partisan Silicon Valley or the legacy media. There’s a real lesson here for the institutional media - that it’s just not worth it to carry water for the Democratic Party; that the more enlightened Democratic politicians themselves would prefer for the press to just do its job, try to be independent, and let the politics play out as they’ll play out.
INVOLUNTARY HOSPITALIZATION - AND THE DUELING DYSTOPIAS
This, really, is a difficult story for me - Eric Adams’ decision to commit to a policy of involuntary hospitalization of individuals exhibiting severe mental illness.
There’s no question that there’s an issue here - major cities are becoming increasingly unlivable - and the problem isn’t ‘crime,’ as in GOP talking points, but untreated mental illness. And there’s no question really about the root cause of the crisis - the nation’s dismantling of its psychiatric public health care system in the 1970s and a general neglect of this issue for decades. As Adams put it in his press conference announcing the new policy, “For too long there's been a gray area where policy, law, and accountability have not been clear, and this has allowed people in need to slip through the cracks.”
I imagine that the initiative will be widely popular. In New York, people really are worried about being attacked, being pushed into subway tracks, by the mentally ill. The expectation would be that some similar set of policies gets adopted sooner or later in Los Angeles and San Francisco - where whole city swathes have essentially slipped out of any sort of law and order.
But, needless to say, involuntary hospitalization is a terrifying idea. As Eon Marques told The New York Times - conducting its (literally) man-on-the-street interviews to gauge the reaction of the city’s homeless to the initiative - “It makes me feel like I’m nothing, like I’m not human, like I’m a dog - something less than human.” And there’s a slippery slope from Adams’ initiative to all kinds of unintended consequences - that the policy is the 2020s equivalent of ‘broken windows theory’ but for mental illness as opposed to low-level crime, buying a period of law-and-order but at the price of mass incarceration; that the state is empowered to take in individuals for ‘acting crazy’ (as opposed to committing actual crimes) in exactly the sort of way that I’m so harshly criticizing the CCP for; and that we will spend the next decades (or however long the policy is in place) hearing really terrible stories about involuntary hospitalization or involuntary medication or restraint once in psychiatric care.
There are two smart-sounding ways to justify the policy. One is that we are simply reverting to a status quo ante - that the United States had a reasonable-enough psychiatric care system up into the 1960s and 1970s but that part of the exuberance of the ’60s generation (think R.D. Laing or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or A Clockwork Orange) was a terror of institutionalization of any kind, a utopian belief that any kind of freedom was better than any kind of institutionalization and that the society could simply adapt to the presence of untreated mental health disorders. (Something of that sentiment is what keeps San Francisco in particular from even acknowledging the extent of its homelessness crisis.) The New York Times has a long, interesting profile on E. Fuller Torrey, a maverick psychiatrist who dedicated his entire career (and ran very much afoul of the reigning liberal public policy ethos) to insisting that the shutdown of psychiatric facilities was a catastrophic mistake and that involuntary hospitalization is the only way forward. For Torrey, Adams’ initiative is a once-in-a-generation attempt to reinstate some sort of rational system. “I think the stakes are large,” Torrey said. “Because if it fails, if you have no improvement at all, I think people give up for another decade, just live with it for another decade before somebody else comes along with a new idea.”
The other smart-sounding way to justify the initiative is to claim that the intractable problem isn’t so much mental illness. It’s drugs - specifically fentanyl and turbo-charged meth. As Sam Quinones, the author of Dreamland, tells New York Magazine, “So you have methamphetamine that is driving people to homelessness, and becoming incoherent and irrational and delusional and paranoid. That’s very difficult for a human brain to accommodate….and people are entering into extreme psychosis.”
I must say that that jibes with my experiences in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and my experience in working on documentaries about opioids - the sense that I’ve been encountering people on the street who simply aren’t there, who have become so addled by the latest generation of drugs that some sort of confinement seems necessary. And in true Big Brotherish fashion, both Quinones and Adams frame involuntary hospitalization as being primarily about helping the mentally ill to access community resources. “I think we need to keep in mind that keeping people on the street is going to be a death sentence,” says Quinones. “There’s a saying on the street, and I’ve heard it from several people, that there is no such thing as a long-term street-fentanyl user like there was with heroin. There are people who use heroin for 30, 40 years, but with fentanyl, everybody dies.” Meanwhile, Adams contends (in civil servant language), “And let me be clear, we will continue to do all we can to persuade those in need of help to accept services voluntarily, but we will not abandon them if those efforts cannot overcome the person's unawareness of their own illness.”
In other words - even if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, even if you’re ‘unaware’ of your own condition - then off to the state hospital you go. As Quinones blithely puts it, “Well, I suppose the devil’s in the details in all this stuff.” And, on this particular issue there are (as all the advocates for the measure acknowledge) many devils and many details. The main issue being that Adams is attempting to create a population for a state psychiatric system that no longer exists - which means, presumably, overcrowding at the existing facilities and, possibly, panicked building or requisitioning of new ones. “We have destroyed the care system in large parts. So I don’t know how to do it overnight,” says John Talbott, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, drily.
But I suppose I am floating with the tide on this one. It’s clear that the major cities need to get a handle on the issue sooner or later - Adams is absolutely right to say that mental illness has been a “grey area” that to some extent really does undermine the whole civic structure. And it’s equally clear that any initiative will lead to some abuses. I really did appreciate The New York Times’ interviews with the city’s homeless - who, given how directly affected they could be by it, were startlingly ambivalent about the initiative. Stephen Gomes, interviewed while panhandling outside Penn Station, had the most lucid description of the issue that I’ve come across and concluded that there really wasn’t much of an alternative. “All the stuff that’s been happening in our society, I think it’s pretty warranted,” Gomes said of the initiative. “All the mental facilities seem to have been closed, and a lot of the mentally ill seem to be displaced within the homeless society. So what are you going to do? Send the police to take them in.”
GENERAL CIENFUEGOS - AND THE END OF THE WAR ON DRUGS
The point Quinones makes about drug trafficking - and the flood of fentanyl and super-meth into America - is that it really can’t be handled at a municipal or even national level, that it really requires cooperation with Mexico. “[The drug trade] seems to me to have surpassed, in some fundamental way, the ability of any town or county to do much about it,” says Quinones.
But the kind of cooperation Quinones is describing was always elusive, and a scintillating ProPublica/New York Times Magazine piece on the botched prosecution of General Cienfuegos makes clear the extent to which Mexico is moving away from any meaningful partnership with the U.S.
The story, which is complicated, convoluted, and limited in its perspective (there’s an abridged version here, by the way), is a familiar sort of made-for-TV law enforcement tale - heroic DEA agents work their way up from street level, find that the drug gangs they’re investigating are being protected, from the very highest level, by their own law enforcement partners, and when they make the case against their treacherous partners and are the closest they’ve ever come to bringing down the whole perfidious pyramid of corruption, higher-ups on their own end lose their nerve from political pressure and give up the case. “If we had to pay a price in Mexico to finally prosecute someone like Cienfuegos, we were all willing to pay it because it would have made a difference,” a DEA agent told ProPublica’s Tim Golden. “But instead, we paid the price and got nothing.”
There’s definitely another possible perspective to have on the story - which is from the vantage-point of nationalist Mexican politics. López Obrador had from the beginning of his regime been deeply suspicious of any sort of DEA involvement in Mexico. Cienfuegos - the defense minister under López Obrador’s predecessor, Nieto - had similarly been, in Golden’s description, “an ardent nationalist who was openly hostile to the DEA.” Evidently, the perspective from the Mexican nationalists was that they would take care of the drug problem in their own way - which meant, in effect, cutting deals with the cartels to reduce violence but otherwise to not bother interfering in the drug flow. There’s little question, at least from the evidence laid out in the ProPublica piece, that the DEA agents had done astonishing work from an investigative angle - tracking a drug lieutenant called H-9 to a gilded meeting at the Ministry of Defense with a man H-9 referred to as ‘the second president’ and tracking the ‘second president’s’ constant shakedowns of the ‘H’ gang for ever more money. But, with Cienfuegos arrested while on a visit to the U.S. - and, really, dead to rights - the Mexican government reacted with vehemence. “I had never seen [the foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard] so up in arms,” the U.S. Ambassador at the time recounted to ProPublica. “We had been through some tricky negotiations but I’d never seen anything like this. They took it much worse than we had expected.” And, in a sense, why not? As Ebrard said to ProPublica, “The arrest had destroyed any basis of trust, any basis of cooperation. They acted deceitfully and with absolutely no consideration for the weight of Mexico. I asked [the ambassador], ‘Would you act that way with France or some other ally?’” In other words, if the former Defense Minister of Mexico really were a kingpin, it would be up to Mexico - not the United States - to arrest him, no matter how egregious the offense. And William Barr, who is the great villain of the ProPublica piece, appeared to see things the same way, dropping the case because - as he wrote in his memoir - “Personally, I felt that Cienfuegos’ case was not worth scuttling any prospects of broader cooperation with the Mexicans.”
From the perspective of the DEA, this was the opportunity - sending an extraordinarily powerful message to the political establishment that no one in Mexico was immune from prosecution, that the DEA was everywhere. The surprise is that Trump didn’t seize the opportunity to advertise his toughness and to embarrass Mexico - and, ultimately, as much as anything, the botched Cienfuegos case turns out to be a symptom of the dysfunctionality of the Trump administration. By the time the DEA made the arrest, Trump was in the thick of the election campaign, and governance and foreign policy appeared to be the last thing on anybody’s mind. But there is an argument to be made that Barr, left to fend for himself, actually made the right decision - that ‘broader cooperation’ was more important than some DEA crusade.
In any case, though, as the ProPublica piece makes clear, the damage was already done. As Golden writes, “The episode led to a near-collapse of law-enforcement cooperation between the two countries…..Many Mexican analysts saw Cienfuegos’ exoneration as an especially powerful message of impunity to the military just as it was taking even greater control of law enforcement.”
From the perspective of Mexican nationalism, the whole thing amounts to a public relations victory. “In other administrations, they came into Mexico like this was their home,” López Obrador was able to say of the DEA. “They even operated here. That’s not happening anymore.”
But, of course, from the perspective of staunching the flow of drugs into the United States, the episode is a disaster - and, in a sense, the ignominious end of the War on Drugs. The DEA agents had made the case of a lifetime - not a trafficker; not a cartel; but, essentially, the political and military establishment itself - and had absolutely nothing to show for it. The result, presumably, is relations between the United States and Mexico continuing to bifurcate; and Mexico very much on its own in attempting to bring some sort of order to endemic violence.
DeSANTIS AND THE SHAPE OF THE GOP PRIMARY
The ever-thoughtful
has an interesting piece on the ‘meaning’ of DeSantis and what exactly his appeal is for the GOP.I have to admit that I’ve kind of assumed that the DeSantis craze is mostly from Democrats looking to drum up a viable primary challenger to Trump. But his 19-point victory in the Florida gubernatorial race is compelling. Polls are showing DeSantis about even with Trump in a prospective Republican primary. And Hanania makes a good case for what it is that makes DeSantis such an effective candidate.
Basically, he’s able to make the ‘culture wars’ his issue without sounding insane about it. In a sense, Covid was a lucky break for him. He bet on keeping Florida open in the early days of the pandemic and banned mask mandates around the state - a move that brought him to national attention and earned him widespread adulation in Florida. “Ron DeSantis started to really become the figure he is today because of Covid,” Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who served as DeSantis’ emergency management chief, told The New York Times. “People are buying what he is selling. That may be politically inconvenient for Democrats, but it doesn’t change that it’s happening and that it’s true.”
But, as Hanania writes, the more important, more long-term bet is on education and the culture wars. Hanania documents in particular DeSantis’ unusual move of involving himself in local school board races - endorsing candidates in 30 races (of which, 25 of his picked candidates won). The strategy is, first of all, based on an understanding that politics is local - that school curricula is a trenchant issue, is felt deeply, and hits home in particular with the kinds of suburban voters who have been the swing constituency in the last elections. And, secondly, the strategy rests on leaning-in to the culture wars in a way that used to be considered bad practice for more ‘mainstream’ Republican candidates. “What’s impressive about DeSantis’ tenure is that he hasn’t had to trade off conservative political victories against smart politics,” writes Hanania. “This is because parental rights is a winning issue.”
Hanania continues, “Why haven’t other politicians achieved similar success? I think it’s because conservatism on the school issue is usually tied up with two other, largely unpopular, positions: election denial and an uncompromising pro-life stance.”
Hanania’s analysis nicely captures the rift in the Republican Party that appeared to emerge with the 2022 midterms. Extremism was a loser. Pro-life was a loser. On the other hand, opposition to perceived liberal overreach - mask mandates, vaccination programs, critical race theory, etc - could account for DeSantis’ almost absurd electoral success, turning Florida (usually the perennial swing state) solidly Republican.
The conservative education activist Christopher Rufo, who worked with DeSantis on Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, claims that DeSantis’ tenure “has now proven that culture war is good policy and also good politics.” Rufo continued, “He has been the most aggressive governor on critical race theory, radical gender ideology and a host of other hot-button issues and the voters rewarded him. I think this really lays to rest this idea that Republicans should be shying away from these issues. In fact, the evidence shows that they should be leaning in.”
To me, all of that sounds pretty convincing - that DeSantis has figured out a model where he can signal to the GOP base that he’s hard right without being, you know, completely fucking nuts while still having it in him to successfully tack back towards the center in a general election - but, on the other hand, I’m not a Republican primary voter. As the former RNC Chair Michael Steele, who presumably has a better grasp of the mood of Republicans than I do, says, “It’s 80 percent Trump or someone who’s cut out of that cloth - again, not going to sell across the country. Because remember, we don’t get to walk away from the stain that we put on ourselves.” In other words, Steele is arguing, the GOP is locked into a kind of death spiral with Trump and, at this point, there’s no way out.
At a structural level, the issue is that, over the last six years, the state party organizations became almost completely dominated by Trump loyalists and it’s that group that’s critical to steering the primary campaign. “If you look at state party organizations, it’s the MAGA strain of Republicanism that’s become dominant. And they’re willing to change the rules, they’re willing to ignore an insurrection, refer to it as just ‘political discourse,’” Steele says. “That hard 30 percent of the Republican base doesn’t want to [move away from Trump], and when the state party operations are run by those very same people, they’re not going to go away from Trump that easily.”
So that seems to be what the dynamic of the next two years is like - DeSantis trying to thread a difficult needle, hard right particularly on culture war issues and yet electable (The New York Times noted approvingly that at the victory speech for his gubernatorial win, the Tampa Convention Center was “packed with stylishly dressed Republicans who looked more like the political establishment than the MAGA warriors at rallies”) while Trump would, in the primary season, have all the structural advantages of an incumbent, with a party machine on his side, and would run presumably on the stolen election and the ingrained traitorousness of the liberal establishment.
Dear god, this will be excruciating to live through.
I do so adore you but your take on the Twitter Files mess and the promotion of Weiss and Taibi as honest brokers of a more balanced journalism seems to veer into areas devoid of real ethical coherence.
Personally I have zero investment in Twitter. I don’t Tweet. I did try in early days - I honestly thought I got banned at some early point in my aborted Twitter career since no one ever followed me but probably I just never got the bug. The tone of the platform was always too snarky for me - way too harsh for my delicate self - anyway
To expect of the Twitter platform (or really any private media platform) run by a bunch of tech executives to be able to navigate consistent principles of sophisticated ethical content moderation is on its face completely ludicrous. How speech is adjudicated, how judgment is meted out, and how transparently is actually an ongoing task of civilization writ large. How power is mediated , how and by whom punishment is determined and delivered - well all this has been a - if not THE critical and challenging set of issues drawn under the rubric of Civilization writ large.
Right now the Right has often defended lies with brutality and physical force. The Left can be crazy and dogmatic and censorious of course, not too mention annoying as hell, but less often comfortable with instigating violence as it confronts other opinions. I have much more to say about the “courage” and insight of Weiss in particular but really don’t fall for her. I can fill you in separately on why, but the Right under Trumpism is beset by bad faith actors willing to threaten, intimidate and kill. The most someone like Weiss might be guilty of is defending malignancy under a strange definition of “fairness” in the Press. She’s more thin skinned than most in the culture wars.
As of this morning Roth and his family having been doxed by Musk has fled their home and is in hiding. That’s so gross and unfair.
Social media platforms are bad at ethical communication and to imagine these private actors could ever create a “safe space “ for free speech is laughable.
All of this: No kidding!!! Excruciating to live through, indeed, Sam. You go for it and do so well at so much. And on Michael Steele, whom I deeply respect--I hope he's right. I, definitely not a political commentator, did write about January 6th here: https://marytabor.substack.com/p/time-for-the-united-states-to-do and am hoping that the voice of Seamus Heaney reaches some. xo ~Mary