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After Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, every week a new hidden flaw appears in the social media network that supports the assumption that Twitter, more than being a company dedicated to its users, was a political agent subordinated to an ideology. The latest case has been the anomalous behavior of private accounts, a function popularly known as “the Twitter lock”.
After paying a whopping $44 billion for the social network, Elon Musk found himself with a dysfunctional and perhaps unviable company, entangled in political intrigues that should have nothing to do with the normal functioning of any social network.
First of all, he inherited an oversized workforce, having to lay off many, many employees. It was not only that it had more employees than necessary, whose redundancy served to support important tasks, but also that many of them fulfilled purely ideological functions and did not act according to technical or productivity criteria.
The fact that after massive layoffs and only hiring a handful of engineers and technical profiles, the platform has continued to operate normally -and even more smoothly- would be confirmation that many employees were only there to restrict freedom of expression.
Secondly, and related to the first point, Elon Musk came across the Twitter Files, i.e., documents showing that teams of Twitter employees were creating blacklists, preventing certain tweets and hashtags from trending, and actively limiting the visibility or even blocking the accounts of “dissidents”, the most paradigmatic case being that of former President Donald Trump’s account.
Twitter’s eagerness to systematically curtail freedom of speech affected “right-wing” accounts, while efforts to control the flow of information and mask controversial issues were almost always made to favor the left.
It seems clear that these irregularities were not the result of employee incompetence or negligence, but were the result of coordinated ideological action, all the more so when the Twitter Files investigations uncovered probable links to Democrats and Democrat-friendly government agencies.
The Twitter lock
The latest anomaly encountered by Elon Musk just this week was that many users realized that if they changed their account from public to private, their visibility would increase exponentially.
Tweets from a public account can in principle be retweeted and viewed by anyone, while those from a private account (“locked”) can only be accessed by the account’s followers.
What at first seemed like a rumor or a possible feature, became a trend, with thousands of accounts doing the test of going private to automatically verify that, indeed, their posts had an extremely high reach among their followers, even appearing on the timeline of people who had not seen a single tweet from the accounts that were previously public for months or years.
Elon Musk himself echoed this anomaly and took his account private to confirm the error.
Although the problem is still under investigation, everything suggests that it is another poisoned gift within the code left by the previous management and, given the precedents, it is quite possible that rather than a bug affecting all accounts in general, it is actually a “feature” that would affect accounts suspected of being of the opposite ideology to the previous management.
The accumulation of problems that Elon Musk has been saddled with in the purchase of Twitter seem worthy of being considered as hidden flaws, and call into question the good faith of the selling party, both at the time of the sale and during the management of a company that was turned into the enforcement arm of censorship and leftist propaganda.
While we continue to discover the hidden traps that Twitter was plagued with, the shadow of suspicion continues to grow over the rest of Big Tech and communication companies, which are most probably also truffled with these leftist tricks designed to curtail freedom of speech.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm