Leftist Twitter users are venting their outrage over seeing tweets from right-wingers appear on their timelines since the social media platform was acquired by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The horror of seeing opinions that do not align with their own jaded views of the world is too much for some to take. There are many humorous examples of their disgust over the free exchange of ideas.
Veteran Star Trek actor George Takei complained that he feels “sullied” by seeing conservative tweets in his timeline made by people “I definitely do not follow.”
British-American MSNBC mouthpiece Mehdi Hasan was horrified to see radio host Dan Bongino “saying Biden is the worst president ever” when he visited his account. He further described having a Kevin Sorbo tweet appear as being “beyond parody.”
Hasan pleaded with Twitter to “make it stop.”
It is so epic how @elonmusk is blowing the lid off how badly Twitter launched an all out assault on free speech.👏👏
— Lee Zeldin (@leezeldin) December 11, 2022
CNN’s Ana Navarro lamented that she is now exposed to accounts she does not follow and asked “is there some way of stopping or at least, decreasing this?”
These eagle-eyed observers saw what everyone else in the virtual town square now realized — conservative voices are no longer being suppressed. Users now engage with those who do not harbor the same worldview, and that’s for the better.
This is a predicament that conservatives dealt with for decades. In order to get information, it was necessary to wade through a variety of opinions that you do not agree with.
Some call this phenomenon “free speech” or the “free exchange of ideas.” And the recent releases of internal documents by Twitter’s new leader only confirmed what conservatives already knew.
The latest “Twitter Files” clearly reveal that company gatekeepers twisted logic into pretzels to try to keep pro-Biden rhetoric on the platform leading up to the 2020 election. As for conservatives, the playing field was tilted far to the left.
One revelation by journalist Matt Taibbi showed that content moderators could not find a “firm policy basis” for suppressing a tweet actor James Woods posted praising former President Donald Trump. They pledged, however, to “hit him hard for future” infractions.
Another incident involved Trump tweeting about incorrect ballots being mailed to Ohio residents. The platform almost added a warning label to the former president’s posting before discovering that the matter in question actually happened as he described.
Twitter is not meant to be a “safe space.” Functioning properly, it is a virtual bulletin board of ideas and opinions that should be freely exchanged. As conservatives well know, being exposed to different viewpoints is a fact of life in a free society and a healthy piece of the democratic puzzle.
