Thread by @benshapiro

To understand the insane Left-wing media and Democratic angst over @elonmusk’s takeover of Twitter, you have to understand the history of monopolistic legacy media dominance in this country.

Until the 1990s, virtually all Americans had to rely on just a few major legacy media sources: the three networks, The New York Times, WaPo, and the like. The Left-wing media establishment loved this: it was an effective collusive oligopoly. Then the internet changed everything.

Thanks to Drudge Report and news websites of the right that cropped up, people could diversify their news diet – and they did, en masse. The legacy media was suddenly being called out and fact-checked by outlets that people actually read.

Now, it’s important to understand how people accessed these websites: predominantly, they did so directly. They bookmarked their favorite websites, and they clicked on them each morning. Then came major social media.

Social media re-centralized the mechanisms of distribution for news. Instead of bookmarking ten websites, for example, you followed ten accounts on Twitter, or added them to your Facebook newsfeed.

This was highly convenient – and it was good for a lot of non-mainstream news outlets, who suddenly had access to billions of eyeballs. A thousand flowers bloomed.

And, for a time, there was stasis: because Democrats maintained political control, these social media sites were praised for their free speech principles, and clever use of these services – a la the Obama campaign in 2012 – was considered good and worthy. Then came Trump.

When Trump was elected in 2016, legacy media outlets and the Democratic Party panicked. They thought they had forged an unbeatable electoral coalition, and there was simply no way Hillary could lose. When she did, they sought someone else to blame – and they found social media.

It was now Facebook and Twitter that had led to this horrific Trumpian moment. Misinformation was to blame, and Facebook and Twitter were the evil platforms that had allowed all of it.

Thus, pressure was put on the social media sites to stop acting as free platforms for dissemination of a broad variety of views; instead, the social media platforms – which had monopolized news traffic – could be used to re-establish Left-wing legacy media oligopoly.

“Misinformation” would be fought by shutting off the traffic spigots on non-legacy media; legacy media would be promoted and elevated. And because virtually all news traffic to sites now came through these social media sites, the oligopoly had once more taken hold.

People were banned for saying the obvious: men were not women; mass masking was not an effective solution to covid transmission; vaccine mandates were ineffective because vaccines did not stop transmission; etc.

By simply claiming victimhood, the Left leveraged social media into restricting the flow of information.

Then came @elonmusk.

It is hilarious that purple-haired interns, playing an inside-outside game with legacy media and Democrats, pressured social media to such an extent that Twitter banned a Christian satire site for saying that men are not women – and that this became a historical inflection point.

But that inflection point matters. Musk will presumably again allow a thousand flowers to bloom. And the oligopoly can’t handle that, which is why they have declared all-out war on @elonmusk. But it won't work. Because all he has to do is say "no."

We can only hope that other social media bosses (cc: Mark Zuckerberg) follow Musk’s lead and find again the mission that led them to found their companies, rather than cowering in the corner at the behest of the Democratic-legacy media complex.