Media scramble to discredit Twitter with false claims about only paying the ‘far-right’
July 17, 2023
Twitter now pays creators a portion of its advertising revenue. This is, apparently, a subsidy, cash flow, to the far Right. That is what multiple outlets have claimed.
The Washington Post writes, “Far-right Twitter influencers first on Elon Musk’s monetization scheme.” The New Republic reports, “Musk’s explanation comes after a stream of Twitter’s verified users—often far-right and conspiratorial ones—received thousands of dollars for helping bring eyeballs to embedded ads within Twitter’s interface.” Deadline: “Twitter’s New $5M Revenue Sharing Program Gives Payouts To Far-Right Influencers.”
This is, of course, a terrible horror, that people who the progressive liberals think are to the right of them gain money from somewhere. What’s worse, the Twitter payouts depend on the traffic a particular creator generates. So, if the “far right” is gaining money from this program, this must mean that the “far right” is popular. And that kills the progressive worldview that the right, let alone the “far,” might be how we normies out here think.
But that’s not the full horror here at all. We’ve got to fight through two more stages in this thinking. This second level, the first of our couple, is that we have a good idea of who is gaining the money from these payouts. Listed here by Brian Krassenstein. 6 of the top 10 payouts are to people who aren’t even on the right, let alone the far right. The other four would be far right only if your viewpoint were the typically progressive and woke media standard. We are not talking about people who advocate wearing sheets and burning crosses, but rather people who might wonder whether everything is entirely hunky dory in our education system. The “far” is only if you start from where the modern media does, not if you apply normal people’s standards.
But it’s the second of our extra considerations, the third overall, which is the most important. You all recall how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was going to allow that far right back into the public square, right? How should we not allow people capable of such evil thoughts to pollute the political conversation? That has been, as we know, a continued insistence – that this so-called “free speech” would allow people to say wrong things.
So what happens when we have free speech? We find out that the far right doesn’t get a look in. We, the people, aren’t that interested. The conversation does move a little rightwards, that’s true. But that’s because anyone right of progressive was having their speech suppressed under the earlier regime. Now we’ve got something much closer to that actual free speech, and there’s little that would be a 1980s Democrat blush, let alone anything “far” in the rightwards direction.
The important thing about these complaints is not how people are making money right now. Nor, really, about who is making it. Instead, it’s the tidal wave of whining and complaints about how people can now talk freely. Which is a very interesting commentary on how the speech was suppressed, right? They have conniption fits that we can question whether sterilizing teenagers is a good idea. What else weren’t we allowed to talk about back then, either?
As has been said, only when the constraints are released do we find out how bound we were before. Freedom of speech may be messy, contrary, and argumentative – but we’d be lost without it.