I'm not on Twitter, well not for the last several years anyway.
But I could run it.
Elon Musk has swerved into First Amendment purgatory pretty much the same way former President Trump blew his chances of re-election and thus his continued efforts at swamp draining.
BOTH of these guys have no controlling philosophical foundation except to make money and “be themselves”. They are geniuses for certain. But their mega-sized cases of narcissism lead to self-destruction.
Fine. I give them permission to be them.
But the problem is they are at the levers of institutions they aren’t prepared to operate. It's one thing to text "Covfefe" instead of coffee. It's another thing to destroy a red-hot economy over a Chinese lab leak, shut schools, and add trillions to the national debt.
Elon is likewise about to ruin his takeover of Twitter if he's not careful. He's stabbing at rulemaking for posting and prohibited categories of behaviour that inevitably will lead to another Robespierrian "Committee Of Public Safety" at the New twitter. Elon needs to calm down.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast Musk stated that he was a “free speech absolutist”. He is no such thing. That’s a binary sorting problem. And Elon is pretty good at math.
You either are a 100% free speecher, as you claimed, or you’re not. (Grow up, people, we're not talking about "Fire" in a theatre speech. We're talking about political, scientific, social, events, and all the other 99.9999999% of speech. You're not in a building. You're on-line.)
Now Musk is so frustrated with managing New Twitter (even after the Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss earth shattering revelations about Old Twitter's free speech crimes), that he’s posted a poll to decide if he should resign as CEO.
Hell, Elon, it’s not that hard. Stay at the helm. Or hire me.
Here's what you do: Change Twitter policy so that it’s the same as ATT or Sprint’s. You are a carrier. Plain and simple. You therefore don’t monitor, control, read, edit, censor, or comment on tweets.
In fact, if I were running Twitter, the only time I’d interact with the FBI, CIA, prosecutors, or police is when a legitimate court order comes in that is constitutional. Only then would a Norm-run Twitter have contact with government law enforcement. Nothing else.
Boom, super easy. It’s just like the town square, the telephone, or a newspaper.
Libels, defamations, copyright infringements, or other crimes committed on-line by miscreant users would be dealt with in court by those enforcing their rights. And Twitter would be fully shielded from liability per Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Criminals caught in such acts would lose money and possibly their bodily freedom in those court actions. Let the legal system work, Elon!
You don't call a strike when the ball is leaving the pitcher's hand. You call it when it crosses the plate!
Old Twitter abused the First Amendment by colluding with the FBI, the Biden campaign, the Obama and Biden White Houses, the DOD, the CIA, and the CDC to eliminate speech they didn't like. That's not America as we ever knew it. It's Big Brother or Minority Report taking away speech rights prospectively when no crime has yet been - nor ever will be - committed.
Our government hand-in-hand with Old Twitter was preemptively smashing blocks of type on the printing press and confiscating trucks full of newspapers on the way to readers.
Once Twitter engages in content control, it becomes biased per se and ought not to be shielded from liability.
If I was hired as Twitter’s CEO, I could solve this binary sorting "issue" in ten minutes. Super easy, super elegant, super First Amendment. Elon, just follow the Constitution.
And if you won't or can't because you don't like people tracking your airplane on Twitter, let me. I don't have a plane anyway.
Let this sink in, Elon!
