“. . . .Two days after the horrifying events of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, Twitter announced that it was suspending Trump’s account permanently, in accordance with its policy on inciting violence. The daily clamor that had affected so many lives was extinguished in a second, and millions breathed relief.”
Smash cut to this week. Elon Musk, who’s in the process of buying Twitter for $44 billion, has announced that once he’s in charge, he’ll undo Trump’s Twitter ban – even though Trump claims he’d rather stick to his own social media platform, Truth Social. A self-avowed champion of “free speech,” Musk said that the decision to suspend Trump was “morally wrong” and that it “didn’t end Trump’s voice. It will amplify it among the right.”
Both of those assertions are incorrect. Banning Trump was the only conscionable response to January 6 – and de-platforming is proven to quash provocateurs. But the fact that Musk is able to act on these ideas regardless speaks to an axiom that Trump himself exemplified: In today’s America, one person with no conscience and access to the right pressure points can do almost anything they want. And as Trump’s record shows, people who are prepared to misrepresent the truth as a means to – or excuse for – abusing their power once will almost certainly do so again.
If we learned anything from Trump’s time in the spotlight, it was that he should never have been allowed it in the first place. Again and again, he highlighted design flaws in systems both state and private that should have better protected the public – whether by lying to his millions of followers on Twitter, or appointing judges to buffer his position in government. Elon Musk’s crusade in the name of “free speech” is already exploiting the same weaknesses. There’s no controlling for shameless, intransigent men, but there urgently need to be more dependable limits over their influence. Musk shouldn’t run Twitter like the Wild West, but as the law stands, he can.
More at CNN
Of course, Boebert has something to say about it because Boebert always has something to say. . . .