Dingus of the Week: Free Speech

Freedom comes for a price, and all that money goes to Elon Musk now

This is the Weekly Dingus, the newsletter that rounds up the inanity of it all and offers up some links and drink recipes. More and more people love the weekly dingus as catharsis from human it all. Subscribe and never miss a dingus.

I apologize to everyone involved, but this week’s dingus is free speech. So yes, we will be discussing the Emerald-dust coated, rocket boy. If you decide not to open this email, that is censorship and you must hate free speech.

---

Holidays with my family are chaos. I have seven siblings, and even if a quarter of us show up, that’s probably more people than you have in your immediate family. We are all loud too—boisterous and opinionated and insistent. At some point, everyone starts yelling. Normally, it’s about something ridiculous. A family memory that we all remember differently. And one sister will scoff, another sister will insist, and another will make a joke. And a brother-in-law will make a conciliatory remark that is overlooked. And then, I will say something pointed and leave the room for another drink. Once, when I did this, my brother-in-law followed me to continue his remarks. “Mike,” I said, “I really like you. But I left because I don’t want to be in this conversation.”

Once, at a Thanksgiving dinner, my sister-in-law banged her hands on the table and shouted through the noise, “Will anyone just listen to me?”

Social media is chaotic yelling. The best of the apps can selectively filter through the ads and the N-words and the rape threats. But most of them cannot.

America’s idea of free speech has never been absolute. There is protected and unprotected speech. But that’s not what is happening on Twitter; right now, speech is a commodity. It’s the product and the speakers are the consumers. It’s a platform that rewards the loudest yeller, the pithiest quote-giver, the person who shouts loudest what we most desperately want to hear. 

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he decried the censorship of the “left-wing” media and the liberal tech companies. Which is ridiculous. Anyone who has worked for a media organization knows that it’s always conservative. When it comes to money, the managers will always be conservative with a little “c”—risk-averse and conciliatory to power. But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that there are a lot of people in America who want to scream what they want, awful things, and they want to do it in your face, and they want you to listen. There is a horde of people who want to hold you by the throat and shout at you, and if you say, “Hey, don’t do that,” they say you are suppressing their free speech.

When Twitter rolled out the “limit replies” function, I would use that function simply so I didn’t explode. A joke tweet about how brie cheese is terrible (and it is truly overrated) would bring in hundreds of people replying that I should simply try more brie, or that I was stupid, or I was a miserable cunt and should die. Once, I tweeted that grown men need bed frames and clean sheets, and it sparked a week of controversy, where people I knew were passionately tweeting threads pointing “what about the women who have no bed frame?” Other people were calling me classist and rich. I turned off the replies. And when I did, I was immediately accused of suppressing free speech.

Is it suppressing free speech to not want to have slurs screamed at you all the time? Is it illiberal to not want to walk into a room where people want to set you on fire? Is it fascism to walk out of a room where people are shouting? Is it censorship to say “trans slurs hurt people”? No, it’s not. 

Parker Molloy - Subscribe at ReadTPA.com @ParkerMolloy

"Not wanting your ads to run alongside a tweet that just repeatedly says the n-word is an attempt to destroy free speech!" -- Apartheid-loving fuckwit billionaire

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

In Verge, Nilay Patel points out the simple truth:

…it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.

Patel also points out astutely that the government is the greatest limiter of free speech. That the same people who will shout a homophobic slur in your face are also pearl-grabbing over what a second-grader might read in the library.

For years, I worked as a content moderator for a love and sex site. I moderated its forums and social media accounts and the comments on its site. It was one of my first jobs in media, and it was disgusting. I’d wake up every day, make coffee, and then log into the moderation system where I never knew what was waiting for me. Would it be walls and walls of spam clogging the comments? Would it be a man posting his fantasies about his daughter? Or would it be someone commenting on my body, taking it apart, piece by piece, like they were carving a Thanksgiving Day turkey?

I deleted a lot of comments. But I often left a lot of them up. Even the gross ones. Because conversation, even bad conversation, led to traffic and traffic to ad dollars. If we could get people talking, we were successful. But it was always a balance. Too much grossness and people leave. Too little and no one talks. I hated that job. But I learned a lot from it.

Speech is the commodity. And it always has been. Newspapers make money off of words. Cable news makes money off of shouting talking heads. Twitter, more so than other platforms, has done a better job of striking a balance between the product (speech) and the consumer (the speakers). But clearly not that good because they sold it to Elon Musk, who Kool-Aided manned into headquarters with the swagger of someone raised on the dust of emerald mines and whose failures have always been lauded as success, and he realized that it needed to make money and fast.

So, his plan is to turn up the volume on the roar and make people pay for it. But you’ll have to excuse me from this table.

And Now For a Good Thing or Two:

Watching Elon fail will be fun. 

The fight for affordable childcare.

Leah Spicer is fighting for Wisconsin.

And keep it up, everyone, the bosses are worried.

What I Am Reading:

• Welcome to Hell, Elon. And Twitter’s day of spite.

• And no matter what James Bennet says, JAMES BENNET WAS WRONG.

• Loved this newsletter breaking down the world of Kristi Noem by Garrett Bucks.

• The rise of antisemitism in America is deeply concerning.

• Columbia Journalism Review made a site that calculates how many news stories your disappearance would generate. My number was 35 because I turn 40 this year and I’m getting too old to care about. But I’d still be covered because I’m a white lady. Great country we have here.

• This week, my profile of Casey DeSantis was published in Insider. If you want to work around the paywall, Pocket app is good, or…don’t tell anyone, but here is a little link. The story looks closely at soft power and who gets to control the narrative. And I’ll send another newsletter about it all, including a call from a Florida PI.

• In that vein, I loved this conversation about who gets to be beautiful in America.

• And “I, a conservative, am concerned about the crime in a city I’ve never been to.”

• Virginia Sole-Smith had a really good look at couples and divides about bodies and food. I’m quoted in the end because this is something I’ve been dealing with this year. And I’m so forever grateful to have voices like Virginia’s that help me navigate issues of bodies and food and parenting in a way that helps my kids have success.

• The estate sale queen of Dallas.

What I Am Drinking:

Hi friends, it’s Manhattan time. A Manhattan is just whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. Simple, strong, and sounds classier than it is. A drink we can all relate to.

The midterms are next week. And I think we are all girding our loins a little in preparation for what happens next. I hope you voted.