Article by Derek Hunter in Townhall
The Best Way to Beat Left-Wing Social Media At Its Own Game
Remember when social media was fun? If you aren’t yet in your 30s you might not remember since you were a toddler at the time. Facebook status updates were funny, people interacted with them and everything you posted. Twitter was the place for quick quips and Instagram was where people showed you what they were eating. Now they’re all different forms of toilets, with left-wing “moderators” moving to silence opinions they don’t like or fear are too effective.
There’s a push to create an alternate online universe, a “safe space” for conservatives and anyone else who holds an opinion out of favor with the fascistic left. While this may sound like a good idea, it’s really just a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It does nothing to address the problem. As I’ve said on this subject many times – no one ever surrendered their way to victory.
Retreating may sound like a viable option, maybe even the best one, but all it does is make the issues it’s supposedly created to address much worse. Yes, the choir needs to be preached to, but if all you do is preach to the choir, and you’re not a reverend, you are not winning anything.
Rather than retreat, a better course of action would be for all the capital being shoveled into these “alternative” platforms being pooled together to take over an existing one.
Lord knows there are very wealthy conservative or libertarian donors out there, or just pro-freedom billionaires with a ton of money (looking at you, Elon Musk) who could do this themselves or partnered with others. Why not?
Twitter would be the obvious choice to target for takeover. Facebook is worth way too much, plus it doesn’t really drive the news conversation the way Twitter does. Instagram is owned by Facebook and is more about narcissism than anything else. TikTok is owned by China and they have no incentive to sell, they’re too busy mining personal information from their idiot users and their phones. And YouTube is owned by Google, which has more money than God and no reason to sell.
If someone, or a group of people, went after Twitter, it’d be getable. You have hundreds of millions of users, none of the “alternatives” come close to that, even with the inflated numbers they put out there. You get a controlling majority and change everything.
Don’t fire all the senior management right off the bat, though you can count on the most radical activists among them quitting. That’s fine, actually desirable, it saves on severance packages.
Those who stay should be given explicit orders that they must implement or be relieved of their jobs. Twitter should be transformed into what it has always claimed to be: a place for open communication where people are free to express themselves however they like. “If it’s legal, it’s fine” is a simple mantra.
The left would go crazy, but they’re already there anyway so who cares? Everyone else go about their business.
The blue checkmark brigade would defect, but only for a while. Just as various conservative “stars” have declared themselves “done with Twitter” only to return without acknowledging their PR stunt (the only person to leave Twitter on their own and keep their word is Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, and he’s much happier for it), these liberals would be back because the know it’s where the audience is. Social media, for all its flaws, is where the egos of narcissists go to be fed.
People with “lifetime bans” for violating Twitter ever-moving goalposts of “community standards” would be reinstated and the block button’s use would be encouraged and yes, that would include the former President of the United States.
Twitter could easily be made into a bastion of free speech – the opposite of almost every college campus and newsroom across the country, where left-wing outrage mobs form…and are ignored. Imagine that. Moreover, rather than taking their ball and going home, conservatives would have the opportunity to make a stand for once. And maybe make a nice profit in the process. Freedom sells, it’s just not for sale anywhere it’s worth buying. This idea would change that.
