An Observation: Leaving Twitter Over Elon Musk Is An Act Of Self-Censoring.

Hating Elon Musk is more than just a fad. It’s a movement that has taken possession of the hearts and minds of many people, especially those who consider themselves to be on the left. Hate is an infection of both the mind and the heart. And it should be noted that it can happen to both sides of the coin.

There have been reports of influential Twitter users leaving the platform upon learning that Elon Musk bought the platform. I’ve seen a few tweets from some of them show up in my feed.

People hate Elon Musk because he’s a billionaire so they are going back to Instagram which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

The irony of leaving a platform owned by one billionaire to go to one owned by a different billionaire isn’t lost here.

But it does reveal a darker problem that has been happening for quite some time now. I’ve spoken about it before.

When an industry tells you who to hate and how to act toward that person, you literally give up control of your critical thinking. And many have done this under the illusion of fighting for social justice.

Whether or not you like Elon isn’t the deeper issue. Self-censorship as a response to someone advocating free speech is, in my opinion, cowardice.

Maybe that’s too harsh of an opinion especially if you think you are doing something good.

The beauty of free speech is that you have the right to silence your own voice to protest someone buying a social media platform. Rushing to do so because you’ve been manipulated into hating someone, however, isn’t really an educated move.

Elon invited even his worst critics to stay on Twitter. His love of free speech and truth shines here. Yet the response from a few verified influencers has shown that they aren’t brave enough to do this.

One of the common criticisms that I’ve seen was that Elon would silence his critics. Which is the opposite of what he stands for. And the inspiration behind this really long article.

I’m going to address three things here because I feel they are important.

• Exploring the collective hatred of Elon Musk
• Understanding why he wanted to buy Twitter
• Highlighting the good he’s done

Exploring The Collective Hatred Of Elon Musk

This hatred is deeply embedded in the psyche of the collective. We hate who we are told to hate or are told are bad without question. I’ve been guilty of it. While living on the streets, I used to think all billionaires were evil and were stealing money from me — that they were the reason I was homeless.

The truth was far from that. Homelessness and poverty are symptoms of a much larger problem that Elon Musk isn’t responsible for. Neither are other billionaires for that matter. Poverty and homelessness are symptoms of a broken society but this is another topic for another day.

Elon Musk being a billionaire is one of the most overused reasons to hate him. Hating someone is never the answer especially if the only information you have on them are cherry-picked facts presented as sensationalized headlines with an aim of destroying someone. Elon has been subjected to this countless times.

The emerald mine story has morphed into a diamond mine and slave-owning story. I’ve seen this countless times on Twitter although it has been debunked several times.

Then we have prominent politicians intentionally spreading actual lies about Elon Musk while asking their voters for money. Or politicians pitching Elon Musk as this bad guy and they will fight him for you if you vote for them. Or donate to their campaigns.

The media industry is nothing more than a tool that amplifies these lies and misinformation today. Yes, it can be used for good. But as with any tool, it can also be used to cause harm.

Why Elon Wanted To Buy Twitter

Too many people didn’t sit down and watch Elon’s recent interview with TED Talks and it shows. In this interview, he shared why he wanted to buy Twitter and what he thought would help it.

If you are truly in favor of free speech, which seems to be something the collective left is being programmed to hate these days, then you would agree with some or all of what he had to say.

“Twitter has become the de facto town square. It’s just really important that people have both the reality and perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

“One of the things I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and make any changes to peoples’ tweets — you know if they’re emphasized or de-emphasized — that action should be made apparent so that anyone can see that action has been taken.”

In other words, show Twitter users how their tweets are either being amplified or suppressed by the algorithm. Let us see how Twitter’s algorithm is working to either amplify or suppress a message. This also will reveal its flaws which is necessary for improvements.

If we are able to see how troll and bot farms are manipulating the algorithm to spread misinformation, we can then understand how it's being done and work on solving how to stop it from happening.

“I just think it’s important to the function of democracy. It’s important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries and to actually help freedom in the world. more broadly than the U.S.”

“I think the civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”

“My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”

If you listen to what Elon is saying and have been following him closely, you can see that this ties in with his personal mission of preserving the light of consciousness. This, I think, was his core reason for buying Twitter. Yes, he had many, but I think this is probably what led him to the decision.

Highlighting Some Of The Good Elon Has Done

Although this is off-topic, I wanted to bring up some of the good that Elon has done over the past couple of years because I’ve seen too many fearmongering tweets about ‘one billionaire’ owning Twitter.

I haven’t seen the concerns about the Saudi Royal family having a stake in Twitter although Saudia Arabia is known for killing journalists and repressing free speech. I digress.

Elon’s foundation has helped many, many people and they probably don’t even realize this. Here’s a short list of some of the charities he’s helped:

• XPRIZE
• Flint Schools
• Feeding Texas
• The Cajun Navy
• SBP USA
• The Good Neighbor Settlement (homeless/food kitchen in Brownsville, TX).
• Unicef
• ACLU
• Cameron County (TX) Schools
• Northshore Foundation
• SWLA and Baton Rouge Area Foundations
• St. Jude’s Children’s Research

You can read more about this here.

In Conclusion

The majority of the people who hate Elon Musk, in my opinion, do so based on unfounded facts, misinformation, and outright lies as well as a truth twisted into something negative. An example of the latter is Senator Warren’s claim that Elon didn’t pay taxes in 2018.

She’s right. He didn’t. But he didn’t owe for 2018. If you didn’t owe taxes, would you still pay them? However, she left that part out.

The fact that so many believe the manufactured misinformation to the point that they are censoring themselves is scary. Who needs a government to suppress free speech in a free country when the people can easily be manipulated into silencing themselves?