CNN contributor Jay Michelson wrote an op-ed for MSNBC titled, Elon Musk’s X is a poison. We don’t need to keep taking it.
This is how he begins:
“How do you solve a problem like Elon?”
Like a pack of anguished Austrian nuns, progressives can’t stop singing this tune on talk shows and Twitter feeds. And for good reason: the world’s richest man has turned a once-essential social media platform into a far-right propaganda machine.
What is a pack of anguished Austrian nuns? Is that like Maria in The Sound of Music?
“Despite his lofty libertarian claims of a year ago,” Michaelson continued, “ X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has put his finger on the scale in countless ways to boost far-right posts and deprecate others — starting with his own posts.”
Michaelson is angry that Musk is supporting the right-wing in this election for the first time ever and voices his opinion, with which Michaelson disagrees.
His solution: All progressives must get off X.
We won’t miss them.
He wants to bankrupt Elon for his belief in the 1st Amendment:
Yet, for all the actions that have been proposed — demanding advertisers boycott the service, going after SpaceX or Tesla or Starlink — the most obvious one often goes unsaid: we should stop using X.
The reason for this silence is obvious: what political scientists call a “collective action problem.” As first articulated by philosopher David Hume, this is when everyone would be better off by acting together, but each individual has an incentive to cheat. Environmental degradation is a classic example. Where there’s a finite resource (a fishery, a common grazing field, or even the entire Earth’s atmosphere), everyone would benefit if we all worked together to protect the resource — but each individual would benefit more by cheating. And so there’s a built-in disincentive to cooperate.
X is similar. If every moderate-to-liberal human and organization stopped using the site, that might pressure Musk or his board of directors to stop weaponizing it. But unless we all quit, it’s quite costly to be among the few virtuous journalists, politicians or celebrities to do so. Except in very rare cases, Musk won’t notice that you’re gone — but you sure will, in the form of less clout, visibility, and impact.
It all comes down to one thing: The Democrats aren’t democratic at all.
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