“TWITTER DOES NOT BELIEVE IN FREE SPEECH”
Every conservative knows that Twitter does not believe in free speech. However, just because one knows something, that doesn’t mean it’s not tremendously satisfying to hear that admission from the horse’s mouth — and in this case, the horse is Siru Murugesan, a senior engineer caught on hidden camera in a Project Veritas video.
Murugesan is an interesting man because he concedes two important things: (1) working at Twitter has turned him into a leftist because that’s the mindset of the entire company, and (2) he’s beginning to think Elon Musk is making sense when he says free speech is important. Murugesan’s open-mindedness may flow from the fact that he’s been experiencing some cognitive dissonance.
According to Murugesan, it’s unquestionable that “Twitter does not believe in free speech.” However, he hasn’t quite grasped that this hostility to free speech is about power and control. Instead, Murugesan attributes it to Twitter’s (and Facebook’s and Instagram’s) unwillingness to allow “bullying and harassment” on the site. As he understands it, free speech is all about preventing “bullying and harassment.”
What Murugesan misses is that for leftists — and he characterizes his colleagues as communists and “left, left, left, left” — bullying and harassment flow in only one direction. It’s bullying and harassment if someone attacks their ideas; it’s “speaking truth to power” if they attack someone else’s ideas.
Nevertheless, despite this cognitive blindness, Murugesan was clearly beginning to be aware of something funny about the way things have been playing out at Twitter. He states that “if you bully a transgender, the right thinks it’s okay, the left does not.” Listening to that, you know that, in Murugesan’s lexicon, “bully a transgender” doesn’t mean hurling vicious opprobrium directly at someone who claims to be transgender. Instead, it means any statement that challenges, whether theoretically or scientifically, the entire notion that transgenderism exists.
But having stated this purely leftist view, Murugesan goes on to note that he realizes that something is wrong here:
Ideologically, it does not make sense like, because we’re actually censoring the right and not the left. So, everyone on the right wing will be like, “Bro, it’s okay to say it; just gotta tolerate it.” The left will be like, “No, I’m not gonna tolerate it. I need it censored or else I’m not gonna be on the platform.” So, it does that on [to] the right. It’s true. There is bias. It is what it is today.
In other words, conservatives are willing to engage in the give-and-take of an open society with free speech. Leftists, however, hate that and will shut it down for everyone.
Another interesting insight Murugesan offers into the Twitter environment is that it’s not run in a businesslike fashion. He’s been working four hours a week for some time and is bestirring himself to work more only because a promotion will net him a big salary increase, a necessary thing because inflation is affecting him. Murugesan notes that other colleagues have absented themselves for months because they needed mental health breaks.
Murugesan describes this disinterest in the bottom line as part of Twitter’s socialist, even communist, ethos. This disinterest in the bottom line may also lend credence to a theory that Sundance, at The Conservative Treehouse, has raised in the past: Twitter’s model is not set up to make a profit, leading him to believe that it’s actually being sponsored by the United States government.
Again, the Project Veritas video doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t already figured out on our own. Nevertheless, it’s still enormously satisfying to have our suspicions and conclusions confirmed. And it certainly makes me hope that Elon Musk has only paused his takeover, rather than abandoning it. Twitter, and America, need more free speech; not less.
Andrea Widburg is the Deputy Editor of American Thinker