Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk said he wants to bring free speech absolutism to the world, but he isn’t off to a great start after tapping a Jussie Smollett hoaxer for censorship advice.
“Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL, @YaelEisenstat, @rashadrobinson, @JGo4Justice, @normanlschen, @DerrickNAACP, @TheBushCenter Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies,” the self-professed “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” announced on Tuesday.
Rashad Robinson, president of the leftist group Color of Change, repeatedly tweeted his support for Smollet after the “Empire” actor falsely claimed to be the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019. At the time, Smollett claimed two assailants beat him up while screaming, “This is MAGA country.”
Politicians, celebrities, leftists, and the corrupt corporate media rushed to ally themselves with Smollett, who was later convicted of five felony counts of disorderly conduct for staging the alleged crime.
Even after evidence suggested Smollett was lying about the alleged attack, Robinson continued to express disdain for anyone who dubbed Smollett’s scheming a hoax.
Robinson prides himself on “Changing written & unwritten rules in media, tech, biz & gov’t.” But given his history of falling for and parroting hoaxes, he is an unworthy and unreliable source for Musk to use in his attempts to correct Twitter’s censorship sins.
Before he won his bid to take over the Big Tech platform, Musk signaled his intent to change Twitter from the woke, thought-police platform it has become into a forum where free speech reigns. Once the acquisition was complete, Musk fired some of the Silicon Valley giant’s top censors but allowed others to stay.
As Musk moved forward with his plans to monetize verification, he appears to be beholden to some of those censors who were allowed to remain on Twitter’s payroll. That includes Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, who was largely responsible for introducing the Big Tech company’s Covid-19 and election information suppression campaigns. He also greenlit Twitter’s decision to ban the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s shady overseas business dealings from circulating the site mere weeks before the 2020 election.
When several users noted Roth’s history of using his anti-Donald Trump bias to justify Twitter’s suppression campaign against Americans and the former president, Musk defended his employee.
“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk replied.
In the same thread, Musk said his company will “not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks.”
That means that users such as my colleague John Daniel Davidson, who was thrown into Twitter jail for rightfully stating that a man is a man, will remain there for the time being.