Generally, the libs, “moderates,” and other powers that be are not happy that Musk might be buying Twitter. For example, Ben Collins, an NBC journalist, took to Twitter and said (the thread has been collapsed into more easily readable paragraphs, so the formatting is different from his tweets):
For those of you asking: Yes, I do think this site can and will change pretty dramatically if Musk gets full control over it. No, there is no immediate replacement. If it gets done early enough, based on the people he’s aligned with, yes, it could actually affect midterms. If Musk is really taking this site private, there are no real guardrails anymore. Rulemaking can be capricious. He can elevate any idea or person he wants through recommendations and UX choices and there will be no oversight on this as a private company.
We know from Musk’s private texts he talks with people who want to let Trump back on and make a “Blake Masters type” a “VP of enforcement.” Masters is a far-right Senate candidate backed by Facebook founder and Trump donor Peter Thiel. In those Musk texts, the redacted senders and recipients lay the groundwork for a “war” and “battle” after Musk takes over Twitter — a “coordinated pressure campaign” that will lead to deplatforming of political enemies.
What does this look like in the short term? Abandonment of traditional moderation policies. Stuff like Pizzagate — pushed by bots and liars — will be protected. Disinfo campaigns will top trending topics and drive news cycles. Authoritarian governments will have a field day. In the longterm, Musk’s plans for this website are a suicide bomb. Very few people want to use a moderation-free app saturated with lies by design. We know this from the dozens of Twitter clones who’ve tried and failed. But he seems deadset on taking bad advice from bad people.
So Collins and those like him are unhappy that the moderation policies might be rolled back and people allowed to say what they want on the flaming dumpster fire of an app.
But that’s just a drop of the anger directed at the idea that former President Donald Trump could, if Elon does end up buying the platform, return to the platform.
Such is what happened on CNBC recently, when CNBC’s Dan Nathan absolutely lost it over the possibility of Trump returning to the platform. Watch that here:
As you can hear in the video, Nathan started off by talking about Twitter as a business, saying:
“It’s interesting when you think about Twitter’s business. Very soon we’re not going to be not talking about it, we’re going to have the transparency if this deal closes. And just to put some context, 10 years ago, Facebook/Meta went public. It had $5 billion in sales.
“That is what Twitter is expected to have this year. So think about how poorly they have grown that revenue based on how they monetized those users. Their users have been stuck. They haven’t been growing them. And when you think about the margin differential between, let’s say, Meta, at about 80 percent gross margin versus Twitter, where they are at 60, and not getting better, this business is going to be just impaired. Because the management and that plan that the whole team was looking at, the 2023 plan, when those news hit the wires today, that team has blown up. It’s gone.”
Responding, Tim Seymour added to what Nathan had said by saying “They already blew up.”
“Yeah, so what I’m staying is, this is kind of like a dead stick right now,” Nathan then said, to which Seymour responded by asking “Are you also saying, as a private company, that it’s even worse off? Because they don’t have to — this is a company that we’re questioning what they’re reporting…”
And that’s what Nathan’s freakout started, with him wringing his hands over the idea that “MAGA town” might come back to Twitter if Elon buys it and takes it private. In his words:
“Let’s say this. If stock-based compensation is a huge part of how these companies incentivize people — this company is being taken out in a manner that is — he’s massively overpaying,” Nathan said. “He’s double paying for that. Usually when you want to buy an asset like this, take it private, you want to retool it, you want lever it up, you want to bring it out at a higher evaluation.
“And that is the incentive for the new management to come in. That’s out the door. That’s blown up. So, to me, I think the service probably gets worse before it gets better. I don’t know how they monetize it better if they’re going to be losing users, which I suspect they will, especially if they’re going to bring MAGA town back to the thing. So, to me, I — I don’t know. I mean, you guys are snickering, but that’s a real issue here.”
There was then a bit of crosstalk, with Seymour noting that Elon is planning on decreasing the amount of censorship and Melissa Lee asking “So, let’s say they reinstate Donald Trump onto Twitter. Would you leave the service?”
And that’s when Nathan said he’d be gone if Trump came back, saying “Yeah, probably. I mean, I don’t need to be there for that. I’m not on Truth Social for a reason. No one other than, like QAnon and MAGA conspiracy —”
To which Lee made a surprisingly good counter reply, saying “But you don’t have to follow him. You don’t have to follow him at all. You don’t have to see anything about Donald Trump or from Donald Trump on Twitter. That is the beauty.”
Indeed. Such is the great thing about freedom of speech and living in a (somewhat) free country. But for leftists like Nathan and Collins, that’ll never be enough. The other side must be silenced and banished, not just ignored.
By: Gen Z Conservative
This story syndicated with permission from Gen Z Conservative