In the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, conservatives have celebrated while some liberals have vowed to leave the platform.
“The bird is freed,” Musk posted on Twitter on Oct. 27.
Twitter employees began circulating an open letter of protest to Musk’s plan to fire up to 75 percent of the staff, insisting the move “will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation,” according to a report by
TIME, which obtained and later published a copy of the letter.
“A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation,” the letter said.
Jason Sullivan found that ironic.
“Maybe they shouldn’t have censored conservatives,” Sullivan told The Epoch Times.
Sullivan—a social media and Twitter specialist and lead investigative consultant to former President Donald Trump’s legal team—discovered evidence of a coordinated operation by influencers and Twitter to set the narrative on Jan. 6, 2021, as events unfolded,
The Epoch Times previously reported.
Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, decried the “
hostile takeover of Twitter“ by a man he describes as ”the richest man in the world who regularly tries to silence critics,” while conservative commentator
Matt Walsh noted how “Twitter employees have happily censored, deplatformed, and taken livelihoods away from people who did absolutely nothing wrong,”
“I’m glad they’re getting fired now,”
Walsh added. “They get no sympathy from me. You all deserve this. Every bit of it. You’ve had it coming. Now it’s here.”
On his first day at the helm, Musk fired Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, legal chief Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett.
“He’s going to clean house. He’s going to trim the fat,” Sullivan said of Musk. “He fired the CEO and the CFO right out of the gate and he fired one of the policymakers.”
Gadde was behind the decision to permanently suspend former President Donald Trump’s account in January 2021, and conservatives celebrated her ouster.
Immediate Changes at Twitter
Breitbart reporter
Alana Mastrangelo laughed in a tweet about the takeover. “Elon Musk had Tesla engineers lock out Twitter engineers to prevent them from making any further changes. lmao.”
Former Twitter systems engineer Taylor Leese posted on Oct. 30, ”
Welp, I just got fired from this bird app ya'll. It’s been grand.”
Leese bemoaned how “the ongoing layoff process is a complete farce and an embarrassment. It’s a bunch of Tesla goons making decisions about people they know nothing about other that [sic] number of code commits. It’s complete absurdity.”
Former Vermont Gov.
Howard Dean, a liberal Democrat, said on Oct. 28 that he would leave the platform. Dean’s account was still active as of Oct. 31.
While conservative figures like Kyle Rittenhouse and Twitter personality Catturd are celebrating the dramatic uptick in their followers, liberals like journalist Aaron Rupar and actor Mark Hamill said their follower counts were tumbling. Sullivan said everybody should have the right to have a Twitter account and to exercise their First Amendment right of free speech without being censored or throttled and without having sneaky schemes deployed in the background to limit the number of followers.
“The promise Musk brings here is the potential of eliminating the rampant biased political censorship that has taken place there and has been systemic throughout that entire organization,” Sullivan explained. “If he’s successful, he'll be a hero.”
