Twitter reinstates Berenson, Musk wants more answers
Banished journalist Alex Berenson and Twitter reached a settlement, and the @alexberenson account, erased in August 2021, is once again active. A brief statement is unsurprisingly short on details:
The parties have come to a mutually acceptable resolution. I have been reinstated. Twitter has acknowledged that my tweets should have not led to my suspension at that time.
Here’s the “misleading” tweet from August 28, 2021, which was supposedly the fifth offense which got Berenson permanently banned. It’s still unsharable – and still substantively correct.
Berenson added that the settlement does not prevent him from continuing his quest to expose potential government pressure on, or collusion with, Twitter. Compared to the legally ambiguous nature of purely ‘private’ suppression of speech, such activity would represent a more definitive First Amendment violation.
On this point, would-be Twitter owner Elon Musk took an immediate interest.
The attempt this spring by the Department of Homeland Security to create a new Disinformation Bureau formalized what Berenson and others suspected the government had been doing informally for several years. A Musk-run Twitter may give us some answers to this question.
The Berenson ban was merely one of the most prominent examples of a broad and growing array of social media censorship. Only a small part of the info-suppression in recent years took the form of flagrant erasures of famous irritants. Far more often, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Google subtly downranked, demonetized, and otherwise demoted disfavored voices and messages.
At first, in the middle of last decade, social media cancellation was mostly obnoxious, a nuisance. In the last few years, however, the full-spectrum censorship regime of new media, old media, and other institutions seriously undermined our society’s ability to process information and make good decisions.
Berenson’s erasure deprived him of his large audience, although he was able to continue communicating with a smaller but substantial number via Substack. The larger effect of the full-spectrum suppression and defamation regime, however, was to not only deprive every journalist, analyst, and decision-maker of crucial data and alternative explanations from dozens of smart people (e.g. Robert Malone, MD) but also to allow the establishment, when even little bits began to break through the narrative wall, to ignore those inconvenient challenges to the favored storyline.
Musk’s prospective purchase of Twitter was the biggest blow to the modern censorship regime. The Berenson reinstatement is another step in the right direction. But we are still only at the end of the beginning of the new information wars.
P.S. Here’s a list of our exploration of these topics over the past several years.
Social media malpractice: A reply to Caplan on ‘misinformation’ – Infonomena – May 31, 2022
Dysinformation: How the exaflood caused an information sickness – Infonomena – May 13, 2022
Twitter liberation, Netflix plunge mark new era for the Web – AEIdeas – April 26, 2022
Elon Musk drops knowledge bomb on information minefield – RealClearMarkets – April 7, 2022
How the war on ‘misinformation’ propelled the Covid cataclysm – RealClearMarkets – February 4, 2022
As rationale for total vaccination sputters, censorship soars – RealClearMarkets – September 20, 2021
Big Tech and Big Finance Breed Hubris – The Wall Street Journal – July 6, 2021
Clarence Thomas asks central questions on tech censorship – AEIdeas – April 6, 2021
Silberman’s anti-censorship warning – AEIdeas – March 25, 2021
Digital Duplicity: Social media purge reveals true goal of ‘net neutrality’ – RealClearMarkets – January 15, 2021
The Technology Solution to Hysterical Mythmaking – RealClearPolitics – December 10, 2020
Big Tech’s presumptuous monopoly on truth – AEIdeas – September 21, 2020
The Internet, Covid-19, and the Open Society – AEIdeas – August 10, 2020
The Gurri-Kuran dynamic: Information wars, part II – AEIdeas – June 10, 2020
Viral speech and the virus: Information wars, part I – AEIdeas – June 2, 2020
Climbing technology’s wall of worry in 2020 and beyond: Part II – AEIdeas – January 14, 2020
Facebook, free speech, and the Nth estate – AEIdeas – November 18, 2019
How information spurred a revolt of the public – and a reactionary elite – AEIdeas – August 15, 2019
Can Silicon Valley disarm the tech policy boomerang? – AEIdeas – July 3, 2019
Big Tech and the science of social scaling – AEIdeas – March 27, 2019
Deplatforming and disinformation will degrade our democracy – AEIdeas – January 15, 2019
Trolls, spoofs, and Hawaiian missiles: What’s real in a virtual world? – AEIdeas – January 18, 2018