What Conservatives Really Don't Like About Twitter
The real reason conservatives are pinning their hopes on Elon Musk
Conservatives have recently been giddy at the prospect of billionaire Elon Musk buying Twitter. Even perhaps more so now that Musk has declared he will be voting Republican because Democrats have become “hateful” and “divisive”, (never mind the violent January 6th attempted overthrow of the 2020 election). It is an article of faith among conservatives that Twitter’s moderation policies are biassed against their points of view. They believe that Musk will remedy the anti-conservative bias they perceive to be rampant on the social media platform.
These claims of bias are of course dubious at best. An extensive study by researchers from MIT and Yale recently found that many more Twitter accounts deemed to be Republican were in fact banned over a six month period when compared to Democratic accounts. At face value this may appear to be evidence of bias. Upon looking more deeply into the issue however, the researchers found that the decisive variable related to banning wasn’t whether the account was conservative or liberal, but was actually how much misinformation the account was spreading.
What conservatives actually seem to want is for speech ridden with conspiracy and largely devoid of facts to be given the same level of credence and to be as warmly received as speech that is more rational and coherent. And when it is not, they play the victim claiming they are being discriminated against. Foolish notions that the 2020 election was somehow stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary, are just one example of speech that many on the right feel is unfairly marginalized on the platform. In effect, conservatives want the participation trophy of social media. They believe that everyone should be a winner. But a society that esteems irrational, even delusional speech, to the same degree as evidence based speech is certainly a society on the decline.
It is right and appropriate that the private sector critically examines speech that is misleading and even dangerous. When in April of 2020 Trump proclaimed that injecting disinfectant may help protect against COVID, poison control facilities reported that poisonings from bleach increased that month as well. When Elon Musk says he is a “free speech absolutist” does he mean that speech that may have injurious or even deadly consequences should be given the same credence as speech that may save people’s lives? That is as absurd as suggesting that our roads and highways should have no speed limits. This may sound appealing to some, but at some point innocent people are bound to be injured by someone else’s carelessness.
What conservatives really don’t like is that Twitter has become a powerful platform in this digital age and they observe that speech they don’t particularly care for has a strong voice there. This bothers them. They naturally want that speech quieted and their own speech amplified. But in fact Twitter is something of a meritocracy where fact based and rational speech is largely allowed to flourish unmolested, while reckless misinformation is sometimes prohibited. A healthy society shouldn’t want it any other way. If conservatives want to level the playing field on social media they may do better to stop playing the victim and instead focus on elevating the quality of their speech.