Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Meghan McCain got in on that one), that it would permanently poison huge chunks of the country, and so on.Īnother claim going viral is that the burning of the vinyl chloride spilled in East Palestine is going to create massive volumes of dioxins-perhaps enough to poison the entire Ohio River basin. history, that it was comparable to or worse than Chernobyl (Rep. During the recent train derailment in East Palestine, for instance, it was very difficult to get a handle on just how bad an accident it was thanks to random accounts that bought Musk’s newly for-sale “verification” checks going mega-viral screeching that it was going to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. Some of that still happens, but it’s much harder to find now amid the clamor of hysteria, shouting, and misinformation. Whenever there was some kind of major event, you could easily find lots of legit reporting and expert perspectives. It already wasn’t all that reliable when it came to nuanced or technical subjects, but it was at least pretty good at surfacing breaking news from around the world. Toxic cesspits full of insanity, lies, and propaganda, as Twitter has become, are an obstacle to public reason and democratic self-government.Īs a longtime Twitter addict trying to get clean with mixed success, I can testify that Musk’s changes have badly degraded the usefulness of the website. Some speech is more free than others, it seems.īut in the process, Musk has demonstrated an important truth about speech-namely, that it requires a context of thoughtful rules to serve the public good. Most recently, Platformer reports that he demanded a change that boosted his own posts in the platform’s algorithm 1,000-fold, because he got mad when President Biden’s Superbowl tweet got more impressions than his did. Twitter has continued to ban leftists, reporters and critics from the platform-occasionally on Musk’s own direct orders-and he also obeys censorship demands from authoritarian regimes. It has since become clear that Musk was lying through his teeth, as someone familiar with his past pronouncements about self-driving car technology or landing someone on Mars might have anticipated. “I’m just fighting for free speech in America,” he claimed in November. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” he posted back in April of last year when the purchase was first announced. When he took over Twitter, Elon Musk repeatedly claimed that his primary objective was to protect free speech. A float depicting Elon Musk is seen in Cologne, Germany on Feb 14, 2023.
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