That’s the headline on an essay by Dr. Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter. (The link should go through the paywall.) After steps were taken to address repeated disinformation spread by Trump on Twitter...
...Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.
This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.
Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.
Dr. Roth goes on to lay out in detail how this is working out around the world with lawsuits, threats of prison, and laws aimed at controlling information and suppressing speech, along with death threats and other measures. They are poisoning the flow of information. And it’s deliberate.
The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. Academic studies have repeatedly pushed back on claims that Silicon Valley platforms are biased against conservatives. But the success of a strategy aimed at forcing social media companies to reconsider their choices may not require demonstrating actual wrongdoing. As the former Republican Party chair Rich Bond once described, maybe you just need to “work the refs”: repeatedly pressure companies into thinking twice before taking actions that could provoke a negative reaction. What happened to me was part of a calculated effort to make Twitter reluctant to moderate Mr. Trump in the future and to dissuade other companies from taking similar steps.
emphasis added
It’s akin to the way they’ve cowed the mainstream media. “Liberal media bias” has been a standard right wing talking point for decades now. Killing the Fairness Doctrine has allowed conservatives to create their own ‘news’ channels without having to actually be fair and balanced (with rare consequences for them). That has not kept them from charging mainstream media with bias, to the point that the mainstream self-censors by reflex.
A Jamelle Bouie opinion piece in The NY Times takes issue with the drumbeat in the press calling for Biden to forswear running for re-election. Titled “The Idea That Biden Should Just Give Up Political Power Is Preposterous”, Bouie observes:
...I find this drumbeat, which has been ongoing since at least 2022 (“Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024,” Mark Leibovich wrote last summer, also in The Atlantic. “He is too old”), to be incredibly strange, to say the least. The basic premise of a voluntary one-term presidency rests on a fundamental misconception of the role of re-election in presidential politics and presidential governance.
Re-election — or rather the act of running for re-election — isn’t an unexpected treat or something ancillary to the position. It is one of the ways presidents seek to preserve their influence, whether or not they ultimately win another term of office.
Bouie doesn’t get into why this argument against Biden keeps coming up, other than acknowledging Biden is of an age and is a reasonable concern, and suggesting it’s partly fatigue — people don’t want another Biden-Trump rematch. However, I commented there is more to it than that.
Let’s be very clear about one thing. The press knows Trump is utterly unfit for office - and the Republican Party is still going to nominate him regardless. The reasonable thing to do would be to treat the Republican Party as just as dangerous as Trump.
But….
That’s not possible for for the press to do, because doing so would be seen as being ‘partisan’. Telling the truth about the Republican Party would make it impossible to treat the two parties as equivalent, like two opposing sports teams, or as a horse race.
So, we end up with story after story about Biden is too old, he should step down, he should dump Kamala Harris, and so on. It’s all about ‘balance’ - except it isn’t. It’s about tiptoeing around the elephant in the room.
Where are the stories calling for Trump to take himself out of the race, or the GOP to dump him? There’s a much stronger case for that - why isn’t it being made?
Where are the credible GOP candidates who could replace him without being him? Where are the stories about people in Midwest diners who are fed up with Trump and want him to go away - but still want what he’s selling?
The Romney retirement story includes tales of Republicans afraid for themselves and their families if they speak out against Trump. Why is Biden’s age more important than that story?
And why isn’t it a big deal that every time Trump opens his mouth these days, he gives constant evidence of the mental decline everyone is scrutinizing Biden for?
Keith Olbermann is speculating Trump only agreed to be interviewed by Meet the Press on that condition that there would be no fact-checking with the interview.
Hunter reports Biden gave a speech explicitly calling out Trump as an existential threat to democracy — and the media downplayed it.
If press rooms can recognize that the House Republican "impeachment inquiry" of Biden is a straight-up attempt to "distract" from all the crimes Trump's accused of, then the rest of it should follow. That means the House Republican attempt is crooked. That means the party itself, or at least its most powerful members, are attempting themselves to subvert democracy by propagating hoaxes.
Follow the ball, here, reporters. Yes, we grant you that Biden is slightly older than his also-old opponent. But what is the thing future historians will be talking about when chronicling this election and its outcome? What are the threads that will be weaved together to explain these times, presuming a future Republican Party allows history books to accurately record them?
It isn't poll numbers on how many Americans think Joe Biden is old, CNN. It's not a few paragraphs tacked on about Biden's "tepid fundraising schedule," AP, after getting bored with Biden's warnings about our imperiled democracy a mere half-dozen paragraphs in. Figure this out.
Every accusation coming from the right is really a confession. It’s political projection, the tactic of charging their opponents with what they are actually doing or plan to do. It’s another side of bullying — blaming the victim for provoking things.
Read the whole article by Dr. Roth. It not only can happen here, it IS happening here. Conservative family values are what you get — when it’s a family of abusers. Bullying works — as long as we are willing to tolerate it.