This is just a quick observation I made this morning while on Twitter or X.
I hope no one takes this as a jab at Elon Musk, it’s not, I believe Musk is a patriot. I actually believe he was asked by the patriots to buy Twitter and was possibly given the money to do so. But as great as it is that he now owns X, I believe there are still many within the company who are still doing everything in their power to censor conservatives.
As many know, Pride Month ended on June 30th. In many Liberal cities, it ended with Pride Parades on Sunday morning. This is not a critique of Pride Month, or Pride Parades or homosexuality, this is a critique of how X still censors people, directly or indirectly.
I live in the suburbs of a very liberal city and follow the three major sports teams of this city on X, or Twitter. This morning as I was scrolling through the tweets and noticed a couple of them posted Pride Parade-supporting posts. The Major League team chose not to post anything in support of the Pride Parade that occurred on Sunday morning, but the NFL and NHL team did.
The comments on the NFL post were 90% negative towards the Pride Parade. Some commented on how immoral and traumatizing it is for naked men to be walking around young children. Some comments were insults, and others simply said it has no place in sports.
After reading the comments of the NFL team’s post, I read the comments on the NHL team’s post, as well as a former hockey player that came out as gay after he retired from the sport. The former player came out after he retired, he didn’t come out while playing in the NHL, this might have jeopardized his playing career. He came out after his career ended; it was at this point that he found the “courage” to come out publicly as gay.
The former player’s post seemed to only have a handful of comments. All of them were very positive towards the LGBTQ+ Movement. I found this strange because of the vast majority of the NFL team’s post were negative. “Could hockey fans really be that much more supportive of the LGBTQ+ Movement than NFL fans?” It doesn’t add up.
Then I saw at the bottom of the comments something you can click on that said, “show probable spam”. I clicked on this and up came all the negative and critical comments. You have got to be kidding me, any and every opposing view is labeled and sectioned off as probable spam. This is absolutely censorship.
When I looked at the comments on the NHL team’s post of the Pride Parade, it was similar, all the comments were positive towards the parade and the LGBTQ+ Movement, but it had something else at the bottom of the comments you can click on. It said, “show additional replies including those that may contain offensive content.” Again, all the negative and opposing comments were in this quarantined, harder to find section. Offensive content like, “children shouldn’t be exposed to naked men”, and “politics should have no place in sports.”
I’m sure someone will accuse me of being homophobic, but I haven’t actually said anything negative about the LGBTQ+ Community, I’ve simply pointed out that in these cases, all opposing views to the Pride Parade were made harder to find and labeled as probable spam or offensive.
This is not free speech. This is people who work at a social media site trying to censor people who may think differently than the belief system they hold. This censorship misrepresents the people. It allows the people who support these beliefs to think everyone is with them and supports them. It causes people who don’t align with these beliefs to think they are alone, no one thinks like them.
This type of soft censorship or indirect censorship is a powerful tool used to condition and control the population. In the case of the NHL tweets, one would believe everyone universally supports the LGBTQ+ Community and its corporate support. In the case of the NFL tweet, where no censorship tools were used, one gets a realistic depiction of what people really think. In this case, what people truly believe is not acceptable to the people who control the social media levers and therefore must be hidden or manipulated in some way.
This is not free speech. If this is the manipulation that occurs around Pride Parades, imagine the stops that will be pulled out when the election gets closer. What would stop these saboteurs within X to block people from hearing information they will need to hear in order to make an informed decision on Election Day.
Elon Musk still has a lot of work to do before X can be considered a free-speech platform. Currently it is still a platform that is manipulating people’s perceptions on reality. Until these idealists have been removed from their positions of power and influence, X is not and cannot be what it is capable of being, a true free-speech platform.
Progress, yes. But the free speech is still short as you’ve noted. Thank you for the update! God bless you, Erik.🙏
Good post Erik.
I totally agree with you about the existence of the old Twitter overlords still lurking.
I was briefly banned just last week, all my followers went to zero and I was in read only mode with no explanation.
Once my account was restored (again with zero explanation) I had to read between the lines of a very obliquely worded statement at log in suggesting that I had been flagged (by a communist obviously) as being a bot.
I think that there is definitely a silent coalition between X insiders and political operatives outside targeting conservatives.
HOWEVER. On the bright side, I unconsciously reposted a post containing the word “cis” which is communist for “straight people are abnormal”. My repost was immediately marked as “cannot send” and an asterisked explanation said I was reposting a term considered demeaning by certain groups.
That’s a direct connection to Elon who has been very vocal about how insulting that term is to normal people.
So progress is happening.