(NewsGlobal.com)- The MSNBC anchor Ari Melber’s response to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter on Monday was by far the most telling.
Melber said solemnly on his program Monday night that if you control Twitter or Facebook, you don’t have to explain. You needn’t be transparent. You might quietly prohibit one party’s candidate or nominees or limit their reach. The rest of us wouldn’t know until after the election.
You don’t.
The left did utilize social media to win the 2020 presidential election. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election,” a remarkable but now-forgotten Time magazine piece from February 2021.
A loose coalition of operatives battled to defend America’s institutions from a severe epidemic, and an autocratically inclined President, reported writer Molly Ball.
“Their efforts impacted the whole election.”
Ball stated a well-funded conspiracy of influential individuals, spanning across sectors and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to shape attitudes, modify regulations and laws, direct media coverage, and control the flow of information.
They aimed to “fortify” the election against then-President Donald Trump, not to “rig” it.
Their efforts spanned the election. They influenced state voting legislation and secured hundreds of millions in public and private money. Millions of people voted by mail for the first time as they fended off voting suppression lawsuits. They developed data-driven initiatives and pressed social media corporations to take action.
A late-October bombshell in the shape of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to ruin his father’s candidacy and undo the organized left’s hard work.
“Smoking-gun emails” reveal that the younger Biden introduced his father to a key executive at a Ukrainian energy business less than a year before the older Biden lobbied government authorities in Ukraine to dismiss a prosecutor investigating the company.
The emails were recovered from a laptop left at a Delaware repair shop and presumably forgotten. The shop owner gained custody of the computer when it was declared abandoned under the repair agreement. But Twitter and Facebook said the emails were “hacked materials” and disseminated in violation of their TOUs.
Facebook rapidly intervened to restrict the article’s reach, while Twitter locked the NY Post’s account, prohibiting other users from sharing the narrative or even photographs. The younger Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with papers that verified the Post’s story, which looked to unearth an international bribery conspiracy.
Who cared?
After 50 blatantly biased intelligence officers called the laptop documents “Russian disinformation,” they were suppressed in legacy and social media.
Of course, the New York Times and Washington Post established the laptop’s authenticity more than a year later, but the suppression worked: A Media Research Center survey of swing-state voters found that 16% of Biden supporters would have altered their vote if they had learned about the laptop, with 4% voting for Trump.
However, the communist conspiracy focused on “fortifying” democracy by stacking the deck against Trump would have been unacceptable. Considering the Media Research Center’s results, social media filtering was probably the most successful.
Of course, they had to boast in Time.
Trump’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories, social media’s viral power, and foreign meddling made misinformation a more significant concern in 2020, Ball found.
Laura Quinn, the co-founder of Catalist, started researching this issue years ago. She led an unnamed, covert effort that monitored internet misinformation and sought to fight it.
The remedy, she concluded, was to compel platforms to enforce their rules, both by deleting material or accounts that propagate misinformation and by more actively monitoring it in the first place.
Following the study’s release, liberal activists urged social media firms like Twitter and Facebook to enforce their policies more aggressively and creatively, leading to an actual crackdown on “disinformation.”
They censored facts because it “fortified” the attempt to “save democracy” and fight Trump.
“Democracy won,” Ball said. “The people’s will won. But, in hindsight, this is what is required to hold an election in America.”
The underlying concern of Musk’s Twitter takeover is that if accurate information cannot be suppressed to save democracy from its foes, those opponents (read: Republicans) may start winning more elections.
That’s unacceptable.
