All conservatives ever wanted on Big Tech social media platforms was a reasonable, fair chance to ask questions without being instantly censored into the ground. Twitterâs new owner, Elon Musk, is making sure that happens.
That was evidenced on Sunday when Republican Kari Lake, an Arizona gubernatorial candidate who lost her 2022 midterm election race, asked Musk why the ability to retweet, like or comment on a post citing an article about her recently filed 70-page misconduct lawsuit against Maricopa County was inoperable.
âIs Twitter still suppressing election criticism & news? Notice how the ReTweet/Comment/Like features are disabled on the tweet about my Election Lawsuit? @elonmusk whatâs up with this??â Lake tweeted Sunday.
Musk, who has proven time and time again that heâs accessible and willing to tackle Twitterâs various issues, responded to Lake less than two hours later, explaining his thoughts on the situation.
âReasonable criticism of elections and judicial challenges are, of course, lawful. That seems to be the case here. Clear incitement to violence will result in suspension and significant deception should result in a @CommunityNotes correction,â Musk tweeted.
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His response was shocking in the sense that under Twitterâs old management, itâs not unreasonable to think that Lake not only wouldnât have received a response to her concern, but also likely would have been subjected to some level of penalization for asking.
Under the old guard, questioning any election process anywhere seemed to be an invitation for at least a temporary account suspension.
Musk identifying the issue and describing Lakeâs criticism of the 2022 midterms as âreasonableâ is nothing less than a game changer for roughly half of the country. It seems like the right approach to take for all of the politically white-hot issues over the past few years, especially the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this particular case, it turns out that the disabled functions on the post citing the Arizona Sun Timesâ story about Lakeâs lawsuit was either a glitch or a user-side error. At the time of this writing, the options to like, retweet and comment on the post are fully functioning.
In the comments section of the post of the Twitter user who linked the Sun Timesâ story about Lakeâs lawsuit, numerous users pointed out that they believed they were still being suspended and censored for certain election-related posts.
âWhat about posting election news stories? Iâve received 3 temporary bans for doing just that. Unless and until you get rid of the Civic Integrity Policy, Twitter cannot claim to embrace free speech and will remain biased against conservative accounts,â one Twitter user wrote.
While thatâs certainly a concern, if true, it seems obvious at this point that Musk is doing the right thing in fixing the absolute disaster Twitter had become under old management. Having only acquired the platform recently, thereâs clearly much work to be done.
Musk has infuriated legacy media types. Hollywood celebs have left the platform. And many progressive politicians seem to be in utter meltdown mode over Muskâs mission to make Twitter a true free speech haven, which will even the playing field like never before.
The coming weeks and months on Twitter will be a gas.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.