Casey Newton on Platformer: X Is Just a Political Project Now

The Trump years were characterized by constant (and almost totally baseless) criticism on the part of Republicans that platforms had abandoned their political neutrality to promote Democrats. During those years, had Mark Zuckerberg hosted a friendly interview with Joe Biden on Facebook Live, Congress would have demanded hearings.

And:

In any case, when Musk talks with Trump on Spaces tonight, a platform that once aspired to be a global town square will have been reduced to a Republican get-out-the-vote project.

Yup, if Elon was doing the exact same thing with Democratic politicians, clowns like Jim Jordan would be calling for X to be forced via regulation to change its ways.

And for what it’s worth, I’ve been incredibly consistent on this for years: if you own a social network, you can set the rules for what speech is allowed and what voices you amplify. I have certain values I would like to see the big platforms follow, but if they don’t, that’s their choice and I can choose to use the ones that I want to use. Elon can do what he’s doing, and I can close my account in response. That’s how it works.

I may as well bring receipts, so here’s me 2 years ago after Elon took over Twitter:

Twitter can make these decisions and users can choose how they feel about those decisions and act accordingly. If you don’t like the decisions made by Twitter, then use something else. This is what I believed for years as Twitter made decisions that I agreed and disagreed with, and it remains equally true today. When I generally approved the decisions they made in the past, I used the service. Now that they are not making good decisions and they’re making the service worse for me, I’ve left.

I, and other people who Ben is referring to, are not arguing that Musk is not allowed to block links to Mastodon or close the accounts for journalists he doesn’t like…we just think it’s dumb as shit.