Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, now known as X, I became interested in the platform as a relatively free venue for gathering and expressing news and opinions. X includes a service called Spaces that allows people to talk to each other without censorship.
Listening was a revelation. After years of tight control, it was liberating to hear what actual people, including real experts, had to say on any and every topic without interference in real time. Now, the same service is deployed by many organizations and podcasts for live shows.
In those days, and it is probably still true, any account with a substantial following could open the app and attract a few hundred people to listen in and comment. I tried initiating a space on several occasions, and it was a real rush.
Something interesting happened one day. I follow The New York Times, and I noticed that the paper was holding a live session on some topic. It was a ridiculous topic, however, something about marginalized trans people of color or something like that.
Curious, I hopped on. To my amazement, despite a torrent of notifications, there were only about a dozen people listening in (the count display is right there). And even they began to fall off after a few minutes.
Perhaps that is when it first dawned on me. No one cares about this nonsense. There is no real market for kvetching about such topics. Everyone is pretty sick of it. The NY Times can go on day in and day out about such things, but getting an audience is another matter entirely.
Something happened to my consciousness that day and continues to this day. I came to realize that the “woke” blather pushed out by these venues survives only because of their crazed ideology (born of the Ivy League) and their legacy power as outlets. Other than that, they don’t really have a serious audience.
Yes, the NY Times has many millions of followers on X. But its posts have far less engagement than you might expect. And much of the engagement is merely making fun of them.
A post I just saw warned about the desperate cold weather in the Southern states on Jan. 24. More than half of the responses were poking fun: “You call this global warming?” “So what: it is winter!” That sort of thing. It’s all pretty funny. X users are nothing if not irreverent.
The NY Times has a hardcore rule. No employee is permitted ever to respond to any critic on X. If you do it, you could be fired. The point is to remain as aloof as possible, as if they don’t read and don’t care about the comments. The truth, however, is otherwise: The reporters care deeply; they are just not allowed to engage at any level.
The freeing of X has been an amazing revelation. Bud Light cannot post anything without eliciting thousands of trolling comments about you know what. No need to report on what Sports Illustrated’s X account looks like now. Let’s just say it’s how you will hear what the mainstream media will not report on why the magazine just fired its whole staff. It has something to do with their swimsuit issues.
Further, there is a reason why Pfizer, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and many others associated with regime propaganda are turning off comments. It seems to be a trend. They just don’t want to hear it.
I’ve tried to test my theory that some 70 percent to 80 percent of X users constitute some form of dissident band of brothers and sisters. I cannot seem to find evidence to the contrary. If this is any indication, it seems like corporate media and everything associated with that is in big trouble.
I’ve noticed that ever more of the NY Times’ content seems to be about streaming music, Wordle, recipes, and so on. This is what sells. The politics and insane woke coverage do not have a market.
Can you even imagine what it must have been like for the “Trust and Safety” team at Twitter back when it was heavily censored? They weren’t just shutting down a few accounts but many, even most. How difficult must it have been for a platform seeking to have reach and influence to silence half or more of its users? Might that have felt rather strange?
Surely it did. When Mr. Musk fired them all, tore out the guts of their code, and just let things run free, use soared and the entire ethos of the service changed. Today, it is a major competitor to corporate news media.
The censorship persists on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google, and every other platform. Here you have a mighty and intricate apparatus to elevate regime propaganda over the thoughts of actual users. In other words, these platforms are not functioning according to a free-enterprise model. They are part of the state itself.
This is precisely why Mark Zuckerberg’s platform Threads, which was supposed to be an alternative to X, completely flopped. It got a huge sendoff from all mainstream media outlets, but they could not cause this extremely censored thing to take off with any real market success. Now, it is a ghost town.
Today, there are alternatives to this old guard and its censorial ways. They are growing in size and reach. The Epoch Times is a serious competitor to what used to be the largest of U.S. newspapers. I know for a fact, because I heard it from someone who works at the NY Times, that all major corporate media reporters in the United States read it, daily. They will never admit it, but they do.
It’s the same with Rumble and many other venues out there. Perhaps it seems to you that when you hang out in these areas of the internet, you are inhabiting marginal corners. That might not be true actually. These venues are growing while legacy media is shrinking.
This whole transition is causing huge headaches and even psychological trauma for the old guard of corporate media. They simply do not know how to deal with it. For so many decades over the past century, they were in charge. They set the agenda. They had a deeply cooperative relationship with the government.
When during COVID-19, and really after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, agencies reached out to media platforms to cooperate in censoring dissent; too many of them gladly stepped up. Why? Because they wanted to preserve their monopoly. They wanted to use “best practices” to beat down the competition and tar everyone else with the brush of being “right-wing” or spreading “hate” and “disinformation” or whatever the word of the day is.
So, for years, the government and major media have worked together to push a single line of thought on the public mind, under the impression that by doing so, they could stay in charge of the historical narrative. This practice continues to this day. But how long can it really last? It truly does not seem long for this world.
The Supreme Court this year will likely take up the question as to whether the government can work directly with media companies to advise on censorship practices in ways that might violate the First Amendment. If that happens and the court decides the right way, it will be a devastating blow to the whole enterprise. We might get our free speech rights back and be able to exercise them on more than a handful of liberated platforms.
What we are gradually coming around to realize is that people who think like us are very much in the overwhelming majority, whereas the rarified and strange outlooks pushed out daily by the corporate press represent the views of a tiny elite. Please remember that. The bad guys are paying attention, and we have them on the run, for now.
“Not that long ago,” Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker told the WEF recently, “we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.”
Those days are over. In the late stage of imperial decadence, the real division is not so much about what is true. The real division is between those who are willing to tell the truth and those who are not. Legacy media is still stuck on the side of not telling the truth.
