Cancel culture has been brought to an end on Twitter, declared Elon Musk, responding to a discussion between podcast host Joe Rogan and journalist Matt Taibbi who helped publish the “Twitter files” exposé.
“RIP Cancel Culture, you won’t be missed,” Musk stated in a tweet on Feb. 14. In the podcast discussing “Twitter 2.0 and the Fall of Cancel Culture,” Rogan stated that the platform has become more pro-freedom of speech under Musk. “Now people aren’t scared to speak their mind on Twitter, like you’re seeing so much pushback. When someone types something on Twitter now, and it’s ridiculous, now people aren’t scared to go in after it,” he said.
“They’re not worried about losing their account, which they were before, which is, I think, one of the more interesting things about Elon Musk buying Twitter is that you are seeing a much more vigorous debate.”
Taibbi shared the sentiment as well. His “Twitter files” exposé had revealed that the prominent social media firm engaged in censorship activities alongside government agencies prior to Musk’s takeover.
“I hope that’s one of the results [of Musk acquiring Twitter]. The old Twitter was just a grindstone of official messaging where if you said like a micrometer outside of whatever the narrative was, you could expect to be descended upon by all these people,” he stated in the podcast.
“You just ended up not wanting to bother. So, you wouldn’t say anything … I hope people are feeling encouraged to say more now.”
Musk and Cancel Culture
In the podcast, Rogan also pointed out that attempts to cancel someone can inversely turn out to be a benefit. Last year, when he was a target for cancel culture activists in a matter involving the audio streaming platform Spotify, he gained two million subscribers in a month, Rogan stated.
At the time, Rogan was accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation in an episode, although the parties he had invited for discussion were highly credentialed individuals with medical backgrounds—cardiologist Peter McCullough and mRNA vaccine contributor Robert Malone.
Meanwhile, Musk’s declaration of ending cancel culture isn’t something new. The tycoon had earlier indicated his dislike for such ideological extremism. On Dec. 1, he wrote in a tweet that “cancel culture needs to be canceled” in reply to another video from CNBC discussing cancel culture.
In the video, host Joe Kernen spoke about the criticism Musk had faced following the purchase of Twitter. The guest on the show, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), observed that activists are trying to bully companies and citizens by trying to impose their culture viewpoint on the broader population.
“We don’t hate each other in this country—I’ve got the data, Joe. Ninety-three percent of Americans say they hate how divided we’ve become as a country. That other 7 percent that doesn’t hate it, those are the activists saying if you buy a Tesla it means that somehow you believe in hate speech. It’s completely absurd and it’s total bullying,” Brooks said.
Cancel Culture Censorship in United States
A survey by the CATO Institute found that 62 percent of Americans felt afraid of sharing their political views. Another survey, conducted among more than 37,000 college students from 159 colleges, found that 80 percent of students admitted to self-censoring “at least some of the time.”
According to David Bernstein, founder and CEO of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, Americans are self-censoring at far higher rates at present than they were even during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s.
A big driver of self-censorship is the fear of being ostracized for opposing social justice ideologies, he said in an interview with EpochTV’s American Thought Leaders program in December. Bernstein stressed that all ideas need to be debated.
“We need ideas to be brought out in public, to be subjected to the spotlight, to be scrutinized so that we know when we’re wrong,” he said. At the same time, “we need people who are more capable of sifting through complex ideas and figuring out what’s legit and what’s not.”
* article from: The Epoch Times
