So what really happened when Twitter played doctor for the Coronavirus pandemic? Elon Musk says the world will know.
Musk was asked by a Twitter user on Sunday if there would be an exposĂ© about how the Social media giant rallied âround the party line during the COVID-19 pandemic.
âOh it is coming bigtime,â Musk replied.
Musk has begun a project labeled the âTwitter Filesâ in which journalists hand-picked by Musk have released information concerning Twitterâs behind-the-scenes activities to muzzle speech on the platform, most recently concerning the ban of former President Donald Trump.
Musk, whose status as a visionary of electric vehicles and space travel, as well as being one of the worldâs richest men, helped make his Twitter account popular long before he bought the Social media platform, later added a zinger themed at Dr. Anthony Fauci.
âMy pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,â he wrote, mocking both the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the countryâs de factor COVID czar, as well as the progressive craze for declaring personal pronouns.
That drew a response from Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene of Georgia.
A self-declared âfree speech absolutist,â Musk has previously said that he will allow Twitter under his ownership to be a wide-open forum for discussion of COVID-19, in contrast to the heavy hand used to regulate posters who differed from the established line that was a hallmark of Twitter during the pandemic.
In a piece published Dec. 3, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote that Muskâs vow not to repeat the COVID censorship model is the right call.
âI understand the temptation to simply say âShut up and go awayâ rather than try to argue people away from beliefs I considered to be poorly evidenced and dangerous. I gave in to that temptation more than once. Unfortunately, I now suspect this did more harm than good â and all the more so when it was official corporate policy rather than criticism from a frazzled columnist,â she wrote.
âFor one thing, moderators arenât good at determining what constitutes actual misinformation. A lot of the dangerous nonsense about covid that circulated on Social media came from the same public health experts Social media companies were using as arbiters,â she wrote.
She wrote that the partnership between âpublic health expertsâ and social media executives was a breeding ground for suspicions.
âFor some reason, the experts concluded that the solution to this problem was to get Social media moderators, another left-identified group, to forbid conservatives from talking to each other about their suspicions. This, of course, only cemented conservativesâ belief that they were the victims of a vast left-wing conspiracy, making them less willing to believe anything the establishment said. And when they were forbidden to state their beliefs on Social media, folks like me could no longer publicly try to argue them out of it,â McArdle wrote.
âI cannot prove that all this cost more lives than moderators saved by preventing people from encountering the suggestion that vaccines will make your kids trans. But in any case, itâs hard to argue that their policy is still saving lives today.â
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
