Elon’s Twitter Takeover: Are Permanent Ban Reversals to Come?
With a stroke of a pen, Elon Musk is now the official owner of Twitter, taking the company private after buying it for 44 Billion dollars and laying out an unprecedented vision on how to take the company to new heights. The most anticipated change due to Musk’s ownership includes bringing back some banned right-wing faces from days past.
Conservatives, in general, have borne the brunt of tech censorship. Since the end of the 2016 Presidential election, big tech companies have worked together like a cartel to figure out how to curve the influence of what they deemed “misinformation,” allegedly pushed by figures on the right, which cost Hillary Clinton an election they were all but assured she was going to win. Federal agencies formed the opinion that it was tech companies’ fault for not cracking down on speech and letting their users run free with their imagination to influence the public discord. This “realization” resulted in the draconian tech censorship current influencers, media figures, commentators, politicians, and dissident figures deal with today.
Figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos lead the brunt of the censorship charges, as they were the first notable figures to feel the Twitter ban hammer. Other prominent figures like Gavin McInnes, James O’Keefe, Ricky Vaughn, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, Emerald Robinson, Mike Lindell, Jordan Peterson, Steve Bannon, Carl Benjamin (Sargon), Kanye West, Rodger Stone, and James Lindsey are some of the most prominent figures nuked from Twitter over the preceding years. On January 8th, 2021, former President Donald Trump, was banned from Twitter by the recently-fired tech CFO, Vijaya Gadde.
Even Twitter users who weren’t banned felt the brunt of the censorship crackdown. As people from Tucker Carlson, Jeremy (The Quartering), Libs of Tik Tok, Charlie Kirk, and the Babaloyn Bee have been the victims of shadow bans from the tech company. Even left-wing voices like Tulsi Gabbard and Steven Bonnell (Destiney) weren’t immune from the fangs of Twitter censorship. No matter how you may view these figures mentioned above, Twitter and social media timelines across all platforms are much better with the diverse ideological speech of many. Leftists view reintegration plans of these people into the mainstream public square as a threat to their current grip on power.
As we’ve seen time and time again, leftists and the leftist state are not going to just stand by and take this change lying down. Tech monopolies like Google and Apple and other governing regulators could move to threaten Elon Musk and the new Twitter with repercussions if the companies fail to live up to the tech cartel agreed upon status quo. Other free speech platforms like Parler, Gab, Truth Social, Gettr, Telegram, and Minds have all faced difficulties or restrictions in getting app approval to be on our devices, along with threats from advertisers to pull out in light of potentially controversial content on the platform. Yet, one has to keep in mind most of these silicon valley tech workers probably do drive a Tesla. If Elon Musk wants, he can make Twitter a mandatory addition to his Tesla ecosystem as he also looks to incorporate the platform into his touted everything “X” platform, which could prove problematic to most leftists and progressives driving his car back and forth to those big tech offices.
Overall, there’s much to be optimistic about regarding the Elon Musk Twitter acquisition. This is hopefully the first domino of many to come, as other tech platforms from Meta, Alphabet, and TikTok are still cracking down on speech they don’t agree with. Gaining a foothold wherever we can is better than nothing, and the growth of other alternative speech platforms helps break up the power of big tech. Whether Elon Musk lives up to the hype, it’s still a great win and a shot in the arm that many censored people everywhere needed.
