Musk made Twitter a better sight by subtraction

 American Conservative:

News about Twitter’s house cleaning under Elon Musk moved so fast over the last few days that it was impossible to keep track of it all. For the uninitiated, we now know that all that was feared about was true, and worse. Twitter was connected deeply to the national security bureaucracy. It was led by extreme radicals with a hatred for any view even remotely conservative. The company interfered with elections. It was deeply censorious, a place where halfwit bureaucrats shadow-banned counterfactual analysis from a Stanford epidemiologists just because that analysis didn’t fit an approved narrative. In the name of social justice and equity, the company was a hotbed of trans and pedophilia activism. Twitter leadership lied to Congress, an offense punishable under law.

As TAC web editor Micah Meadowcroft summed up the fundamental politico-theoretical impossibility on display:

Twitter presents us with a case study in the most pressing problem of our digital age. As technology has grown both in capacities and use, it has seemed to outstrip human scale and to mediate every aspect of human life, to the point where it might cease to be an object of human intention and will. Instead of a tool, it has begun to appear, whether in the form of bureaucratized corporations or even greater abstractions like the global market, as almost a sort of god, subjecting humanity to a will of its own. But as C.S. Lewis reminded us in the Abolition of Man, the growing power of science or technology over biological nature is in fact the growing power of some men over other men. Which means then that the apparent absence of human responsibility we associate with current technological order is only that, appearance. The human beneath such scale is obscure, but technologies are made by human hands, so it is never truly absent.

Take for example Twitter’s former head of safety Yoel Roth, who has now fled home, a situation that might lead him to sympathize with the “safety” of any number of the conservative judges who have faced relentless organized mob protests. Roth wanted us to know that satire sites such as the Babylon Bee are dangerous. As Roth said in a wide-ranging chat with Kara Swisher, “We have seen from a number of Twitter accounts, including Libs of TikTok, notably, that there are orchestrated campaigns that particularly are singling out a group that is already particularly vulnerable within society.”

After Musk’s takeover and Roth’s departure, new Twitter internal reordering banned a number of accounts associated with child grooming and pedophilia, as well as (purely coincidentally, one is sure) a bunch of Antifa accounts, prompting violence from the group. Why were these accounts active under the content-moderation practice of the earlier group of Twitter officials, including not only Roth but former senior data scientist “Melissa” Ingle? Under the old regime, Twitter banned the mention of the word “groomer”, and restricted prominent users for using it, citing it as a slur against the LGBTQ community.

All this raises questions and hopes about what can be done about bureaucracy in general. If Twitter can efficiently run its core operation and bring back viewpoint neutrality after the majority of the managers are culled, is there something for Republicans to learn and apply to American’s national security bureaucracy? From NATO to the NHS to Twitter, bureaucracy acts the same way, banal and self-serving, zealously protective of its turf, expanding to the detriment and erosion of other organizational components, disdainful of those below and deferential to the powerful, functionally opposed to skepticism, and existing simply to justify its own existence. Twitter is an app that can ban you for writing something silly or cruel. It is important, but perhaps not existential. The American deep state can harass you, create a world where the process itself turns into punishment, or imprison you on absurd charges for life. But until Musk came along both were defined by layer upon layer of bureaucratic management.
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Twitter is a better and more interesting site under Musk. I hope he continues to bring common sense back from the jaws of liberal nonsense. People who think Libs of Tik Tok and Babylon Bee are dangerous while allowing child grooming, pedophilia, and Antifa have lost total perspective about the subject.