t 4am a couple of weeks ago, Ryan Carson, a young activist for social justice, was sitting with his girlfriend at the B38 bus stop at Lafayette Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard in New York. They were on their way home from a wedding party. Carson was suddenly accosted by an aggressive stranger who asked: “What the fuck are you looking at?” and then stabbed him to death.
“As I rode the subway home to Bedford-Stuyvesant,” Lee wrote, “I watched as the video clocked 1m views, then 2m. Up up up. Disgusting replies flooded in by the thousands: That’s what you get for supporting woke policies; should have carried a gun; looks planned. By the time I got home, I had deleted the app from my phone.”
Twitter wasn’t that great long before he acquired it, but at least it had committed employees who tried hard to reduce the toxicity of its more malignant users. Under Musk, though, with his fatuous delusions about “freedom of speech”, just about anything goes. At the moment, for example, it seems to be-inspired fantasies about the “stolen” 2020 US presidential election, the role of the “deep state” in persecuting the January 6 insurgents, anti-vax conspiracy theories and so on.
It’s much cheaper to run a social media company when you don’t have to employ moderators to keep it clean and legal