The people who self-identify as the foes of "disinformation" often are unloading disinformation because they hate conservatives more than they revere truth. On Monday's The Reidout on MSNBC, host Joy Reid brought on NBC News "dystopia beat" reporter Ben Collins to claim that Twitter is already losing big to Mark Zuckerberg's "Threads" site and to claim with a straight face that Big Tech censorship is a conspiracy theory spun by the uncool people that nobody likes.
That "Twitter Files" business, that established the reality that in 2020, federal agencies pressured social-media companies into suppressing Democrat-damaging narratives like the Hunter Biden laptop and associated scandals? That's just chum for kooks. Collins spread his appearance on Twitter:
Said the quiet part out loud a little on TV today: Maybe it's not censorship. Maybe people just don't agree with you.pic.twitter.com/93NHasEku4
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 10, 2023
JOY REID: Twitter is still a dangerous place in terms of disinformation. We know here’s lots of disinformation, you know about Ukraine, there’s lots of Nazi stuff on there – but I wonder if it concentrates it so much that the right-wingers gets bored of talking to each other, right? When Twitter is Gettr, they don’t want to be on there. They want to be where the liberals are, because they want to own the libs, and they can only do that in places where normal people are. And. I wonder if start trying to infect and impact Threads the same way and whether there's enough guardrails to keep them from going over there. Because that’s one thing I’ve noticed. They don't like talking to each other. They want to talk to normal people, and they can only do that if they break out of their closed platforms and get on to ones where normal people are.
BEN COLLINS: Yeah, it's the ever-repeating story of the internet. This is how it's always gone, by the way. People create these small enclaves where they find themselves to be safe, comfortable to have regular conversations with their friends. And then those places become cool and interesting, and people want in on those conversations, that want to be part of that community. They become bigger and bigger, then eventually they become so big that some people with unpopular opinions think there's a conspiracy as to why they're being shut down. Sometimes, for example, they create these things called “The Twitter Files.” that they launch GOP congressional investigations to find out why these things are happening. But it turns out that maybe their opinions are just not something that people want to listen to. It's not censorship, it’s just – the way it is.
REID: It's not us. It's you. Sorry, right-wingers!
So it's not "censorship" when things are removed from Twitter. It's merely a signal that the abnormal people, the "people with unpopular opinions" shouldn't be listened to, they're not the "cool and interesting" people. They "infect" social media when they join.
Joy Reid's show for "normal people" was supported in part by SimpliSafe.
