In brief, nobody’s tweets had been unfindable to the general public with out the poster figuring out about it: If they had been suspended or banned, naturally they’d remember. De-amplification—affecting an individual’s rating in search outcomes and the like—is relatively completely different. Some would possibly name it “freedom of speech but not freedom of reach.”

The individuals enjoying semantic video games are Musk and his propagandists, performing a pantomime of transparency whereas glossing over a variety of points. Matt Taibbi revealed that the Trump administration made requests of Twitter on a regular basis—however we all know nothing about what they had been, which had been acted on, and why. Weiss revealed that the transphobic account Libs of TikTok was truly being given preferential therapy: No moderation resolution could possibly be made in regards to the account with out consulting higher-ups, a privilege afforded to only a few on the platform and doubtlessly applied to keep away from upsetting the ever-voluble on-line proper. Why? 

But, greater than that, there was completely no transparency about Musk’s decisionmaking since his arrival. Where are his emails? When can we achieve perception into how he’s single-handedly made quite a few content material moderation choices already? When can be allowed to confirm that his public statements match his non-public reasoning? When will we learn the way vital choices about staffing had been made? The reply is: possible by no means, within the absence of efficient authorized motion. 

Musk’s Potemkin transparency is supposed solely to flatter him by ginning up false scandals about Twitter’s earlier management (whom, it have to be famous, he has made relatively wealthy together with his buy). It paints a fictive picture of Twitter as a dictatorship that Musk has liberated to the adulation of cheering lots. That, other than its basic utility to the proper wing’s bottomless politics of grievance and self-victimization, is the chief goal of this complete enterprise. For the populist proper, it provides a Zeno’s paradox of a conspiracy, the place the final word revelation is only one extra viral Twitter thread away.

It is tough to take individuals severely after they complain about Twitter having been led by a group of titled people with managerial obligations making administration choices whereas they concurrently cheer the consolidation of these duties within the arms of one man. What Musk provides is just not transparency: It is caprice. His idiosyncratic whims, for which we will solely take his phrase with none mechanism of enchantment or accountability, are the content material moderation coverage. It beggars perception that anybody may see this as an enchancment.

This mirrors the broader fiction in regards to the takeover promulgated by Musk’s followers: that he has one way or the other emancipated the corporate and made it extra democratic and accountable. But in company governance phrases, he has merely moved from the oligarchic democracy of a publicly traded firm—which, not for nothing, was required by regulation to reveal a terrific many issues to the general public—to a personalist dictatorship.

What he desires of is freedom from any accountability. He’s not liberating “the people,” he’s liberating himself: taking Twitter non-public was about guaranteeing he’d not be accountable to shareholders or a board, and that he may disclose solely what he needed. In a usually brazen transfer, after granting ideologically captured stenographers unfettered entry to Twitter’s instruments to advertise a message he permitted of, he despatched an email threatening his own staff with legal action if they ever leaked anything. Transparency certainly. Musk desires of a world the place nobody tells him “no.” It’s a solipsistic dream shared by too lots of his followers.