Meme - Luis Fernando Mises: "Disney buys out Marvel, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Miramax etc.
Lefists: *silence*
Facebook buys out Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, etc.
Leftists: *silence*
Google buys YouTube, Motorola, Waze, Fitbit, etc.
Leftists: *silence*
Musk buys Twitter.
Leftists:
Robert Reich: "It's called platform monopoly. It's bad for our democracy as well as our economy.""
Time Magazine wokesplains that "free speech in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th," and it's even dumber than you think. - "These kinds of comparisons are non-sequiturs, of course. First, he's not spending $44 billion on a big party. He's merely purchasing a property owned by others. The money doesn't disappear. Second, she is counting on readers to quickly pat themselves on the back for how very much more virtuous they are than this billionaire without taking the time to check her links. We always check the links. The numbers she cites, which are dubious at best, don't "solve" any of those problems. Those numbers are the annual expenditures required to address the problems, annual expenditures that likely never go away, never mind increase over time. As anyone who has ever run a household knows, buying a house is not the same as buying groceries. But, okay, let's play the game for a moment. Does Alter enjoy wine? Well, in this country we spend over $70 billion a year on wine. Based on Alter's math, if we would only all give up wine, we could solve America's homelessness problem, plus world hunger, and still educate every child in nearly 50 countries. So selfish. We spend $100 billion on our pets, too, and don't get me started on ice cream... I guess you hate children as much as Elon Musk does... Who gets to decide what is "misinformation" is exactly why free speech exists. It's the exchange of ideas in the marketplace, from the very birth of the republic. Sure, we have mass media, but we've always had mass media. Just because it was printed did not make it any less mass, not in any meaningful way. When the Federalist Papers were being written, there was a huge debate over what form of government the country was to adopt. Each side could easily have argued that the other side was spreading misinformation regarding the problems, or lack thereof, with the Articles of Confederation. These arguments were made in the newspapers, the corporate mass media of the day, and were hashed out by citizens exercising their inalienable rights to free speech... "This free speech thing." This belittling of a timeless principle tells you everything you need to know about what she thinks of it... Ready for some racism? Of course you are."
Senate Dems considering calling Elon Musk to testify on Twitter buy - "Commerce Committee member Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., called Twitter "central to democracy and our economy.""
Musk Calls For Investigation Into Far-Left Groups Trying To ‘Control Your Access To Information’ - "Elon Musk called for an investigation into far-left groups that are reportedly pressuring advertisers on Twitter to boycott the platform if Musk rolls back the platform’s content moderation policies. “Some of the nation’s biggest brands including Coca-Cola (CCEP), Disney (DIS) and Kraft (KHC) are facing calls to boycott Twitter if the company’s soon-to-be owner, billionaire Elon Musk, rolls back content moderation policies limiting hate speech and election misinformation”... "more than two dozen civil society groups said marketers should secure commitments from Twitter to retain its most critical policies, including on civic integrity and hateful conduct, and threaten to withdraw funding if Twitter does not comply." Some of the far-Left groups that signed onto the letter include Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, GLAAD, Media Matters For America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the Women’s March... “Who funds these organizations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate …” Musk responded in a tweet. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”... “My goal is to maximize area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the ~80% of people in the middle.” Musk added in a separate tweet, “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”"
Of course, it is dangerous and anti-democratic to ask who funds leftist pressure groups
The great American free-speech panic - "Freedom of speech is the ‘dread of tyrants’. That’s how Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist, statesman and former slave, put it in his seminal 1860 speech... ‘Slavery cannot tolerate free speech’, thundered Douglass. He saw open discussion as the means to liberation. Today, those who might consider themselves his heirs think you can censor your way to utopia. But one thing at least remains stubbornly the same: more than 160 years later, free speech still fills the American elites with dread... According to CNBC, members of President Biden’s inner circle, Democratic strategists and Barack Obama are worried Musk might lift the ban on Donald Trump and cause ‘misinformation’ to swirl ahead of the next election. White House press secretary Jen Psaki dodged a question about Musk this week, but did refer to the president’s ‘concerns about the power of social-media platforms, including Twitter and others, to spread misinformation’. Here we see a neat demonstration of how the Democrats’ years-long moral panic about ‘misinformation’ maps rather neatly on to censoring their opponents. That had already been made clear with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal – the New York Post exposé that Twitter and Facebook labelled as misinformation and censored in the run-up to the 2020 election, but has since been backed up as true by other outlets. The human-rights establishment is similarly shaken by the prospect of more free speech on the internet. Amnesty International USA has warned Twitter’s new boss not to ‘erode enforcement of the policies and mechanisms designed to protect users’, noting the ‘disturbing persistence of hate speech on Twitter’. Among the activist set, meanwhile, Musk has been smeared as a racist whose definition of free speech is ‘allow[ing] white nationalists to target / harass people’. The American elites, whose forebears gave the world the First Amendment, have apparently decided that similar standards cannot possibly apply on the internet. That ‘hate speech’ should be censored on social media has become common sense among so-called liberals, even though it is impossible to censor in US law. Censorship of those deemed ‘hateful’ – a now bloated category which, according to Twitter’s current policies, includes those who ‘misgender’ – has been outsourced to the private sector, and the elites are worried that Twitter under Elon Musk might no longer oblige. Indeed, Big Tech censorship was never about a few oligarchs deciding to inflict their views on everyone else. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO who presided over Trump’s ban and many more besides, is a sort of hippy libertarian and has wholeheartedly endorsed Musk. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg resisted the role that was being foisted upon him – as digital Minister of Truth – for years before he eventually gave in. The pressure on them to censor came from within – from the sort of Silicon Valley workers currently apoplectic about Musk’s takeover – and from without – from Democrats threatening to break up or regulate the tech giants if they didn’t clamp down on ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate’. The American elites have come up with all kinds of convoluted reasons as to why it’s good and proper for Silicon Valley to wield its unprecedented power against those they disagree with. But those reasons keep changing in revealing ways. Before this week the argument was that Twitter can set whatever speech policies it likes because it’s a business and anyone who doesn’t like it can go elsewhere. Now they’ve suddenly changed their tune. And for all their deeply felt concern about misinformation the elites have turned a blind eye in recent years to how their war on misinformation has produced its own kind of misinformation – such as the hasty branding of the Hunter Biden story or the Covid lab-leak theory as bonkers conspiracy theories, only for it to turn out later that there was actually something to them. This has become a vicious circle. Some of the genuinely mad movements unleashed in recent years – from QAnon to Stop the Steal to Covid anti-vax guff – are actually a demonstration of a well-worn argument against censorship. Namely, that censoring bad ideas doesn’t make them go away and can give them a glamour they do not deserve. Censorship has a way of making people think they’re on to something. Combine this with a mainstream media that now routinely prizes The Narrative over the facts – calling BLM riots ‘mostly peaceful’ and Kyle Rittenhouse a ‘white supremacist’ – and you’ve got a toxic mix. The crisis of trust in the mainstream has sent many looking for answers at the margins. And the more that do, the more censorship is meted out. But then again this was never really about misinformation, was it? This is about America’s ruling class becoming deeply sceptical about one of America’s founding values, and deeply sceptical about their fellow citizens. So-called liberal elites simply do not believe that ordinary people can be trusted to sort truth from illusion and are now convinced that some higher power must vet their reading material for them. They believe that the answer to bad speech is not more speech, but ruthless corporate censorship. They have convinced themselves that free speech is a threat to civilisation, rather than the core of civilisation. And all it took was for an election not to go their way. It is striking that this philosophical turn away from free speech, which had been slowly congealing in academia for some time, suddenly went mainstream around 2016"
Elon Musk tells AOC to 'stop hitting on me' - "Elon Musk took Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s attack on billionaires in stride, urging the outspoken Democrat to “stop hitting on me.”... “Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy,” he wrote, adding a smiling emoji. The line appears to be a reference to when Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said her Republican critics on the platform just wanted to date her. “I was talking about Zuckerberg but ok,” AOC shot back at Musk before deleting the response about a minute later."
Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "Best Blue Check meltdowns of the Elon Musk Twitter buyout"
Axios on Twitter - "The world's richest man — someone who used to be compared to Marvel's Iron Man — is increasingly behaving like a movie supervillain, commanding seemingly unlimited resources with which to finance his mischief-making."
Jeff Jarvis on Twitter - "Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany."
David Leavitt on Twitter - "If Elon Musk successfully purchases Twitter, it could result in World War 3 and the destruction of our planet."
Meme - Lilah Sturges @LilahSturges: "I don't want to leave Twitter but it seems a given that if Musk buys it it will become completely uninhabitable for trans people (and lots of other people)."
Max Boot 🇺🇦 on Twitter - "I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less."
Meme - Michael Volpe OBE: "Elon Musk buying Twitter is the end of the world basically. He'll amplify every extremist right wing nazi he can find"
Fox News on Twitter - "MSNBC's Katy Tur warns viewers about the 'massive, life and globe-altering consequences' if Musk buys Twitter"
Meme - Hari Kunzru: "If Musk buys Twitter and puts Trump back on here it's really going to reduce my quality of life"
Meme - (((DeanObeidallah))): "Can't wait for Elon musk to charge users for tweeting. retweets etc. he needs to turn a profit.
Wonder if Elon musk will copy the apartheid rules of his home country South Africa and give us check marks based on our skin color? The whiter the check mark the more rights you have on Twitter. #AskingForAFriend"
Meme - Ozzie: "#RIPTwitter Twitter, Inc. sold out to Twitler. *Twitter logo with Nazi Swastika and Hitler moustache*"
Poll: 62% of Americans Approve of Elon Musk's Twitter Buyout - "women, Republicans, people over 40, and lower-income earners were the demographics that are most excited about the Musk takeover, with even 57 percent of Democrats saying they think Musk would improve the platform. Meanwhile, just 13 percent feel the SpaceX CEO will make the platform worse. Moreover, just 19 percent of respondents said they will be less likely to use Twitter once Musk owns it, with the percentage rising to 31 percent of Democrats and 33 percent of government employees."
Twitter has seen a 263% jump in job interest since Elon bought the place 😆 - "That number comes from how many daily clicks on job postings there are on Glassdoor."
Meme - "Just build your own Twitter..."
"Oh fuck off."
Liberals don't like it when their "principles" backfire
Meme - Travis Allen @TravisAllenO2: "I love when the trash takes itself out by leaving Facebook and Twitter to join Parler."
Travis Allen @TravisAllenO2: "Will you leave Twitter if Elon Musk buys it?"
Twitter engineer says 'Commie' staff 'censors the right' - "A senior Twitter engineer has been secretly recorded admitting that the social media giant is “censoring the right” — and that he and his co-workers are “Commie as f–k.” “Twitter does not believe in free speech,” Siru Murugesan said... “Elon [Musk] believes in free speech,” added Murugesan, who claimed that many of his colleagues “hate” what might happen if the Tesla founder’s on-hold $44 billion takeover goes through. “Some of my colleagues are like super left, left, left, left, left,” said the engineer, adding that many have threatened to quit if Musk takes over and enforces his free-speech model. “Our jobs are at stake — he’s a capitalist, and we weren’t really operating as capitalists, more like very socialist,” Murugesan said. “We’re all like Commie as f–k.” “‘I think it’s just like the environment, like you’re there and you become like this Commie — they call it ‘Commifornia,'” he said of staffers’ nickname for woke California. Murugesan was also filmed admitting that the company’s left-wing slant directly affects content on the site... According to Murugesan, right-wingers are more likely to tolerate abusive messages while those on the left will simply refuse and quit the site. “We’re actually censoring the right, and not the left,” the engineer was recorded saying, later adding: “It’s true. There is bias. It is what it is today.”... “I basically went to work like four hours a week last quarter,” he added. “And it’s just how it works in our company.”"
The left's cope is that Project Veritas releases video clips out of context. No surprise that they sound like religious apologists
Audit Shows Nearly Half of Biden's Twitter Followers Are Bots - "A tool created by the software company SparkToro that distinguishes real accounts from fake accounts known as “spambots,” or “bots,” found that almost half of President Joe Biden's 22.2 million Twitter followers were not real... 49.3% of those following the official @POTUS Twitter account are bots based on an analysis of location issues, default profile images, date of creation, and more. The company's tool also found that Biden's account has more fake followers than most... a Twitter poll showing a majority find Agrawal’s tweets to be dishonest."
zerohedge on Twitter - "Twitter's choice: admit Musk is right and it has a huge fake userbase, opening up existing management to countless shareholder lawsuits, or kill the deal and be sued for record shareholder value destruction."
Cernovich on Twitter - "Twitter is a private company if you don’t like censorship buy your own twitter.
Elon: Ok.
REEEEEEEEEE"
Report says Gates 'poured' millions into attacking Musk, Tesla CEO responds - "Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday slammed billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates after a report claimed that the Microsoft co-founder poured millions into attacking Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter... the groups behind the anti-Musk campaign belong to wealthy Democrat donors and their family foundations, labour unions and the governments of European nations... about 26 activist organisations and NGOs signed a letter to Twitter advertisers asking them to boycott the platform if Musk makes content moderation changes. It was later revealed that some of these groups are funded or tied to billionaire philanthropist George Soros, former US presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. "Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety, especially among those already most vulnerable and marginalised," the groups wrote to advertisers."
Twitter's current toxic state is good, because the left controls it, of course
Meme - "LEFTIST TESLA OWNERS REALIZING THEY HELPED ELON MUSK BUY TWITTER"
Twitter says it will sue Elon Musk after he sends letter seeking to end $44B acquisition deal
How Elon's bizarre Twitter takeover saga could have just been a cover for him to sell $8.5 billion in Tesla stock - "some Twitter influencers are floating an alternate theory for the change of heart: The bots were never the problem, merely a vehicle through which to covertly sell Tesla options that were about to expire."
