X owner Elon Musk touted his social media platform as a glaring and much-targeted news island in an ocean of elite media bias.
During a conversation in Poland with The Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro, Musk made the point that X was not only an exception among social media companies, but an exception among the media in general. Shapiro and Musk agreed that media elites abruptly changed their treatment of Musk after he purchased the social media platform.
“It was amazing to me how much the legacy media walks in lockstep — nobody breaks ranks, so now we have X that breaks ranks and doesn’t just go with whatever the approved narrative is,” Musk said. “I think for many in the public, they don’t quite realize just how much deception is really going on with the media. The biggest deception is the choice of narrative.”
Musk added that the media “can write a story about this or write a story about that.” However, he warned that “only a few stories can go on the front page – so you’re deciding essentially, what people should pay attention to.”
Musk went on to say that instead of catering to the concerns of the public, the leftist media responded to a different audience: newsroom editors. Musk said that the media prominently addressed only “what a handful of editors care about.” He continued, “They’re telling the people what to pay attention to, so the deception by choice of narrative is a big thing. So that’s why I really want the narratives to bubble up organically from the people in the case of the X system, which they do.”
When Shapiro told Musk that “there was a censorious hand placed on all of these tech companies,” Musk agreed that this was “unequivocally” true.
Later on in the interview, Musk and Shapiro contrasted the current situation on X with the censorship regime that preceded Musk’s takeover.
Musk told Shapiro that he generally tries to “increase the so-called Overton window of what can be discussed, what is okay to discuss without being ostracized.” He stated, “Certainly attacking DEI–would have been ostracized before and not anymore. And anything that’s sort of sensitive or that the media ignores, the public can then raise it on the X platform and make that an actual topic of discussion.”
In response, Shapiro brought up prior the rampant censorship of biological reality, when accounts were censored for referring to men as men and women as women. Since taking over the platform, Musk ended censorship around “misgendering” and “deadnaming” and ended the suspension of satire site The Babylon Bee’s account for the same reason.
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