Twitter's Sly Attack On Free Speech
A few days ago Twitter mysteriously removed tweets containing links to Substack. For those unaware of Substack (reading this after it was shared or republished outside of Substack), it is a platform used by many independent journalists and commentators, some of whom might otherwise be denied their say by the mainstream media. Amongst the more well known users of Substack are Konstantin Kisen, Dominic Frisby, Matt Goodwin (author of the widely acclaimed new book “Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics”), Laura Dodsworth, Robert Malone, Ed West, Andrew Lawrence, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Peter Imanuelsen of Peter Sweden fame and many others, including myself.
Thankfully, after a few days and possibly following the intervention of Elon Musk himself, those links have now been restored. However Twitter still appears to be filtering searches for Substack to other irrelevant searches, usually ones containing the word “newsletter”. These “redirects” even block the word "substack" in URL slugs. So Twitter’s war on Substack is still continuing.
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-substack-search-newsletter
Many independent journalists and commentators rely on Substack to publish their articles. Blocking links to those articles and/or redirecting Twitter searches away from them is a direct attack on freedom of speech. Public debate is already corrupted by the preponderance of mainstream media propagandists in thrall to corporate interests, pressure groups and of course governments. Those propagandists are, of course, not blocked from posting their links on Twitter. Indeed they are often amplified.
The impact of this meddling by Twitter will be to drive traffic away from independent thinkers using Substack, and attempt to redirect those users back to mainstream media outlets for their news stories and commentary. That’s the inevitable outcome. Independent journalists who can speak freely without being told what to say by big corporations and special financial interests (eg those connected to Bill Gates or BlackRock) will be sidelined.
It is a major attack on free speech. As bad as any that occurred when Twitter was being run by Jack Dorsey.
Defenders of Twitter give out the usual refrain that Twitter is a private company and can allow or restrict anything that it wants to, especially if users are using the platform for free. That misses the point. Twitter can either be a platform or a publisher. It should not be allowed to be both.
Publishers create specific content, such as newspapers and journals, and can be liable for false or libelous content. A platform merely provides the space where any content meeting general standards can be published by others. Two quite different beasts, subject to quite different potential liabilities and regulations.
Platforms are highly dangerous and damaging when they are misused in this way. We are already aware of the impact of Twitter’s ban on the New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to polling day in the 2020 US Presidential Election. The outcome to that election is increasingly viewed as being warped by that action by Twitter, quite possibly carried out under “Deep State” pressure.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-twitter-suppressed-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story/
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was initially widely hailed as a victory for free speech. The meddling with Substack shows such optimism might well prove to be yet another false dawn.
(PS: I note that during Tuesday, 11th April, the redirecting of searches on Twitter for “Substack” ceased, though intriguingly the standoff between Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi who helped Musk run the “Twitter Files” still seems to be continuing since Musk became aware of Taibbi’s Substack activity. Substack have also now announced that Substack notes, the supposed bone of contention between Twitter and Substack, are being made available to all its users)
https://twitter.com/cjgbest/status/1645804524068818945