Elon, the Left and Free Speech

The reaction to Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter has certainly been interesting. The possibility that Twitter will now be a platform on which there's minimal censorship has some on the left in a tizzy.

They think free speech means that racist, sexist and homophobic epithets will become common currency on Twitter. They liked the way things used to be when people whose ideas and tweets they didn't like could be exiled from the social gathering place.

Under the old regime, for example, Twitter suspended the accounts of right-leaning users at a rate four times that of left-leaning users:

A recent MIT and Yale-led study of politically engaged U.S. Twitter users in both parties found that 36 percent of the Republican accounts studied had been suspended in the six months after the 2020 election vs. 8 percent of Democrat accounts.

Some attribute the disparity to the alleged "misinformation" disseminated by users on the right, yet the definition of misinformation seems to be any point of view which deviates from the progressives' approved opinion.

If a user tweets information about Hunter Biden's laptop, for example, or expresses skepticism about climate change, or the ability of men to get pregnant, or the efficacy of Covid lockdowns, they risk being locked out of their Twitter account.

Musk bought the company ostensibly to end this bias, to make the platform more tolerant of divergent views, and now the left seems to be in a panic. Liberals have sounded alarms, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) anticipating an “explosion of hate crimes” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calling the deal “dangerous for our democracy.”

Employees have quit, others have threatened to sabotage the site, and thousands of users have closed their accounts.

Musk doesn't consider himself a conservative, rather he sees himself as somewhat of a classical liberal or libertarian. He recently tweeted this illustration that shows him pretty much where he's always been on the political spectrum, while the left has moved much further toward the extreme left:

Musk is surely correct that the center has shifted leftward over the last two decades as many liberals adopted very far left positions on race, immigration, economics and sexuality. And free speech.

Free speech, once championed by liberals in the 60s and 70s is simply not a cherished value on the left anymore. They seem to value only speech with which they agree.

They claim their dislike for Musk's takeover is due to the fact that, as they believe, he'll allow hate speech to thrive on the platform. Of course, much hinges on how one defines hate speech, a term that's often conflated with any criticism of any leftist person or position.

In any case, the fact that thousands of users chose to leave now rather than wait to see what sort of platform Twitter becomes reinforces the suspicion that these people simply aren't interested in, and don't value, free expression. They want a platform on which only people who think just like them are allowed, and they want to be able to exclude any opinions or arguments which might nudge them out of their ideological comfort zone.

What they don't want, it seems, is for Twitter to become a genuine marketplace of ideas. Perhaps that's for good reason. When orthodoxies are allowed to be challenged they're sometimes found to be intellectually wanting.

The last thing the left can afford is to have their orthodoxies openly subjected to logical analysis and criticism. That, from their point of view, would be a calamity.