We Hunted The Mammoth
Bowing to public pressure, and perhaps also cognizant of the latest plunge in Tesla’s stock price, Elon Musk has restored the accounts of the journalists he impetuously banned on Thursday night. Well, most of them. He’s left behind several smaller lefty outlets, including It’s Going Down. And he’s newly banned the account of another journalist, Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, evidently for no other crime than writing critically about Musk.
Twitter suspended some journalists. You may have heard. On the off chance you haven’t already read one of the dozens of pieces on the subject, let me fill in a few of the main components of the whole sordid story before moving on to the right-wingers and their collective orgasm over the media bans.
Elon Musk’s so-called free speech crusade is making Twitter a more hateful place, reports from two watchdog groups charge.
So if you were wondering if Elon Musk was really going to open up the sewers and “amnesty” all the worst people who’ve ever been banned from Twitter, it sure looks like he’s doing just that. Today the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin, initially banned way back in 2013 for something truly terrible, we assume, is back and shitposting up a storm, as it were, on the increasingly Nazified social media platform.
So activists on the far right are distributing a list of 5000 “Antifa” Twitter accounts they hope to mass report and get banned, not for breaking any Twitter rules, but just because they want to silence everyone who disagrees with them.
It was apparently Twitter’s suspension of the Babylon Bee for transphobia that inspired billionaire manbaby Elon Musk to put in a bid for the social media company in the first place. Now Musk has completed his mission at Twitter, such as it was, announcing today that he has restored the account of the terminally unfunny “satire” site, as well as that of Canadian fusspot psychologist Jordan Peterson, who had also been suspended for a transphobic tweet.
Twitter seems close to utter collapse, so if you follow me there and want to make sure you get notified when a new post goes up, consider subscribing to We Hunted the Mammoth via email.
I get mail, some of it nice, some of it not so nice. And people try to leave comments that are insipid or vile, which I don’t let through moderation.
But once in a while, I like to share some of these with you all because they are quite special in their own way.
Last night, Elon Musk, the new Chief Twit, tweeted that under his reign, “comedy is now legal on Twitter.” He did this after reports that his Twitter takeover had encouraged a nearly 500% increase in the use of the n-word on Twitter, as fans expecting looser rules tried out the limits of Musk’s “free speech absolutism” to see how many times they could use the word “n*gger” in a tweet.
Elon Musk now owns Twitter. He promises he won’t make the place a “free-for-all hellscape.” I’m not so sure.
