They went down the slippery slope and lost our trust

They went down the slippery slope and lost our trust. By Francis Turner.

A lot of people who are not left-wing globalists like the idea of tw*tter but prior to it being bought by Musk were unwilling to use it because of its censorship of viewpoints and facts that went against the left-wing globalist agenda. …

Musk thinks tw*tter has a large unaddressed market to expand into and a more healthy revenue prospect from selling premium subscriptions rather than going for just advertising. … So long as Musk is able to sign up enough new customers it doesn’t really matter if some of the current lot flounce off in a huff. …

The network effect means that it is unlikely that a new platform or any of existing ones are likely to gain critical mass unless Musk actually alienates a very large number of current users.

The start:

The good idea is to stop scammers and other crooks fooling suckers into sending the money. You have no idea how many hundreds (thousands?) of scammers are blocked everyday by law enforcement and the large tech companies (and large financial institutions in some cases) collaborating to take down their phishing posts/domains etc. etc. The collaboration to take down as much of this crud as possible as quickly as possible is an unalloyed good that stops thousands (millions?) of Americans and others from being scammed every day. …

The next step down the slippery slope:

The collaboration then moved on to foreign state actors — which again is a good thing in that foreign state actors do use social media to hook and infect dissidents, domestic government employees and so on. Again this is a good thing. Having defense secrets, industrial secrets etc. stolen by the Chicoms, the Norks, the Mullahs etc. is something we all want to stop and since the foreign state actors use social media to set their lures just like the criminals** using the same collaboration system to stop them is entirely logical. …

This step is a small one:

But then we’re … stopping foreign state actors spreading disinformation (which they do — there is however plenty of actual foreign disinformation put out by the Chicoms and the Russians, and so on).

But this step is too far:

The step … where they go … to anyone spreading “disinformation” is flat out bad and leads to justified outrage .And that’s exactly where we are today in the US.

It isn’t helped by all the other Deep State shenanigans regarding “Orange man bad” and the way that people who should have known better jumped on claiming “Russian disinformation” in cases where there wasn’t any.

For now, while a significant fraction of the US “Right” has lost their trust in the DHS (and FBI and so on) and the amber warning lights are flashing all over the place, the Trust Thermocline hasn’t been breached. If (when?) we learn that the censorship has been wider than it currently seems to be the thermocline is going to be breached for a large majority of Republican and independent voters and that’s going to be very messy.

The Republicans might do something about it:

Presuming that the Republicans win control of both parts of congress then one thing that they will be able to do is stop funding these bureaucracies.

The left and the (p)resident may scream but with the Supreme Court in its current state there seems no doubt that a budget resolution that explicitly removes funding for specific agencies/divisions and activities performed by agencies would be held constitutional by the court.