I don’t think it’s right to cast an unfavorable light on our elections integrity by saying Twitter or whatever social media platform encouraged a person to vote a certain way. See some of my
posts after that one. Like you said, people can bitch all they want about x said y on Twitter or wherever but none of that has led me to think, “our elections aren’t fair cause Twitter is interfering”. That’s garbage and even if I buy into the argument that social media as a whole can have a large impact on a sizeable portion of the voting public, I would then strongly disagree that any one figure is able to steer that control a specific direct that would be material enough to think we should start telling Elon or others they can’t state their opinions on politics.
My beef with his post is he’s undermining the results for something that is perfectly normal in a free society and is only focusing on the actor he doesn’t like because he’s endorsing the party he doesn’t like.
I’m certainly not saying that Elon Musk can’t tweet his opinion about politics.
Comparing a
known endorsement—whether that be Obama or Trump endorsing someone, or a properly labeled editorial in a newspaper, to biased control of the overall flow of information is a false equivalency. Endorsements aren’t the issue. In fact, a person giving a political opinion isn’t my issue with this.
I could always read an editorial in a newspaper, but it was clearly labeled as such, and elsewhere in the paper I could expect to actually read the
news, which had certain standards of journalistic integrity. This is my main concern: the lack of standards for journalism in general, and like you said, this is just as relevant with MSNBC as it is with FOX (for example). This becomes extremely problematic if “news” sources are allowed to publish complete horseshit, and then social media companies use algorithms which favor it.
A person stating their
political opinion is fine—although if we are talking about public figures, media outlets, etc., it should probably be clearly labeled as such. As a private company, if Twitter or FB or whomever used an algorithm which somehow favors one ideology over another, I suppose that’s their right. What is more troubling is that the OANs, Dinesh D’Souza’s, Tim Pools, etc are able to publish absolute dogshit as news, and then massive social media companies could potentially favor the spread of one flavor of dogshit over another flavor (so to speak).
I wouldn’t call doing such a thing “rigging an election,” but it certainly an attempt to stack the deck by shaping the political views of people in extremely false and misleading ways. It’s hard to call it fair. When we’re talking about the spread of straight misinformation planted by a foreign power, that’s even more problematic.
