Many on the right heralded Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a major victory in the culture war. But that celebration appears premature. On June 1, Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing wrote that Twitter had scuttled a deal for the conservative multimedia outlet to screen its massively popular documentary “What Is A Woman?” on the social media site.
After initially agreeing to show the film, Boreing says he was told Twitter “would no longer provide us any support and would actually limit the reach of the film and label it as ‘hateful conduct’ because of ‘misgendering.’” The news was surprising because after Musk purchased Twitter, the site supposedly eliminated previous policies on punishing users for so-called “misgendering” to affirm Musk’s commitment to free speech.
After being called out on his own website over the episode, Musk claimed he overrode the decision of his employees and called the incident “a mistake by many people at Twitter.” However, that evening when the Daily Wire posted the documentary to its Twitter account, it was slapped with a label that said, “This Tweet may violate Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct,” and users were not allowed to share the film.
If the only way for free speech to prevail on Twitter is to make an appeal to the site’s easily distracted owner, and even he still can’t prevail over the decision of his employees, it prompts an obvious question: Who is really running Twitter? People who care about free speech aren’t going to like the answer. Musk’s recent selection of wokeist Linda Yaccarino for CEO raises all kinds of alarms.
