Twitter 1.0 Acted as Arbiter of Covid Truth | City Journal
During a global pandemic, the role of social media companies shouldn t be to police discussions about highly complex, multi-factorial medical questions such as the effectiveness of cloth masks against viral infection, potential adverse events from mRNA vaccines, or the origins of Covid-19. Their role should be to allow free speech to thrive and opposing perspectives to clash in the marketplace of ideas.
Most Americans wouldn t argue with those premises but as recent revelations have made clear, under former CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, Twitter assumed the role of arbiter of truth, deciding which scientific viewpoints to suppress and which to boost in visibility. Now, as part of his effort to re-orient Twitter, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has recruited independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger to sift through the company s private documents and internal communications and publicly share the inner workings of its past moderation decisions.
This story is getting very weird.