President of humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse and son of the late pastor Billy Graham, Franklin Graham voiced his support for Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter.
Graham shared an article about Musk raising the needed capital to buy Twitter, adding “.@ElonMusk announced today that he’s raised the funds to purchase Twitter. I’m glad to see someone who cares so much about free speech get involved with this platform. He said, “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.” That’s great to hear.“
.@ElonMusk announced today that he’s raised the funds to purchase Twitter. I’m glad to see someone who cares so much about free speech get involved with this platform. He said, "Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it." That’s great to hear. https://t.co/i2JmFQZvXz
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) April 22, 2022
Graham, a proponent for Free Speech, is clearly happy to hear that the world’s richest man is doing something about the blatant censorship on Twitter, which has been described as a town square for sharing ideas. However the reality is that Twitter is not in favor of Free Speech and the man currently running the company has made that clear.
During an interview with EmTech MIT, Gideon Lichfield ask the now Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in 2020, “You’re caught in a bit of a hard place as somebody in the audience is also pointing out, that you’re trying to combat misinformation, you also want to protect free speech as a core value, and also in the U.S. as the first amendment. How do you balance those two?”
Agrawal’s response was quite telling, “Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.
“One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention.
“And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory. “
Since Agrawal has taken over Twitter, more than ever users have had their accounts suspended. A satirical news account was locked out of their account for “hateful conduct” as they selected Rachel Levine, as “Man of the Year” as a satirical response to USA Today opinion section naming her one of the top women of the year.
Levine, who’s given name is Richard is a transgender pediatrician who transitioned from male to female and was confirmed as Assistant Health Secretary by the U.S. Senate in 2021, being the first openly transgender to be confirmed by the Senate. She was also made an honorary four star admiral as well late last year, another first.
Many others had their accounts suspended for just following the wrong people on Twitter.
Elon Musk has seemingly come to the rescue while free speech is blatantly under attack by Twitter as well as many other social media platforms. Graham and many others have openly voiced their support for this.
In a recent tweet Musk shared, “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy”.
A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2022
The right side of the political spectrum seems to face more scrutiny then the left. Something that seems hard to deny when looking at promoted content as well as main stream media.
Hopefully soon we will see what comes from Musk’s push to take over Twitter, it does look like Twitter’s board my try to put up a fight.
