Commentary
The Voice Of Twitter's God
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, November 21, 2022
Well, at least Elon Musk appears to be having fun.
Following his reinstatement over the weekend of some of the most questionable accounts banned by Twitter – including @realDonaldTrump, @kaneywest, etc. – Musk celebrated the social media platform’s new “freedom of speech” policy in a series of sophomoric tweets rife with sexual innuendo and even drug use.
In one, which @elonmusk quickly deleted, he posted a mashup of animated “Family Guy” character Lois staring desirously at a prescription drug bottle. The character was labeled “Donald Trump” and the prescription bottle was labeled “His reinstated Twitter account.”
In its place, @elonmusk tweeted a meme showing the image of a pious monk-like character praying to the heavens as he stood next to a young woman, bent over, skirt hiked up, with a Twitter logo covering her private parts. The monk character was labeled “Donald Trump.”
While Musk clearly was egging the still dormant @realDonaldTrump account on, @kanyewest wasted little time reactivating his Twitter presence with a mixed message sure to provoke outrage among people outraged by his previous anti-Semitic hate tweets.
He simply tweeted “Shalom” filed by a text-based smiley face.
And it appears that just about the only previously banned Twitter account that will remain so is Info Wars’ conspiracy promoter Alex Jones’, citing the loss of his own firstborn child and that he has “nor mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame. Unless you’re Elon Musk, I guess.
One thing that was clear from Musk’s capricious decision-making about reinstating banned accounts – or not – is that he appears to be the one personally making the calls, not any Twitter safety and security team, not a content advisory board, not even common sense.
Before reinstating @realDonaldTrump, @elonmusk conducted a Twitter poll asking followers to vote on it. At presstime, the poll generated more than 15 million votes, with 52% favoring the account’s reinstatement.
“Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted as he made the decision to reinstate it, using the latin terms for “voice of the people” and “God’s voice.”
Reading that post, I visualized Musk donned in emperor-like attire, gesturing “thumbs up.”
But a more appropriate metaphor might be one of Emperor Nero, fiddling as Rome was burning.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
From This Week with George Stephanopolous roundtable - 11/20/2022
PONNURU: But I think that this time what needs to happen....the press needs to cover Twitter with an understanding that's internalizing in every story, that most people aren't on it....And - and even most people who are on it aren't obsessive about it the way we in the press tend to be. That, I think, has been a real dysfunction in the - in the relationship between the press and Twitter.
@Dan Ciccone: Excellent point. That said, the readers of MediaPost are not most people. They are media industry professionals, many of whom make investment decisions involving Twitter.
Thank you Elon for bringing back Freedom of speech to Twitter and no longer bowing to the radical left's wokeness and Doxing, of anyone or anything that hurts the Sheeples fragile sensibilities!
When a person let alone a nation, can no longer engage in discourse with anyone but those of a similar ideology, then freedoms are lost forever, as is the ability to learn or teach.
Of course the left forgets or more to the point; never knew, that due to 95% of Main Street Media locking Trump out of honest reporting and coverage (or simply not reporting) for the last 7 years, while knowingly pushing nothing but fabricated lies, he was forced to use Twitter to get the country engaged and aware of the Good things he was doing during his Presidency.
Was/has be been outrageous in much of his outreaches? Of course, as nothing else would have generated exposure, even if it was "Trumped up" garbage! No such thing as bad press, as they saying goes.
Now under Brandon, the whole nation has gone to Crap, in every aspect imaginable, while the Marxist Spewing Media, mostly lies about every thing! Honest Journalism has been mostly dead for almost a generation!
Should Trump be back on Twitter, MSM should be ecstatic as they again have fodder for their pathetic talking heads!
Scary stuff, Joe. BTW, that first figure named Trump---the one in Musk's first post that you say was deleted---- looks a lot like Trump's ex-"lawyer", Sidney Powell. I wonder if that is another signal for us to ponder?