# [[Twitter]] [[Censorship]] ## [[Mike Solana]] post after [[Jack Dorsey]] resignation https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/twitter-is-about-to-get-way-worse ### Censored [[New York Post]] over [[Hunter Biden Laptop]] In looking ahead for some sign of what’s to come, I think it’s first important we look back at what Twitter did to the New York Post. In October 2020, the paper published a story on Hunter Biden’s laptop that strongly implied Joe Biden, then the presidential nominee, was corrupt. The story was immediately shut down by Facebook, which reduced traffic on the offending piece pending a third-party review (that seems not to have happened). But Twitter blocked the piece entirely, and then took the additional steps of locking the Post out of its account and prohibiting every user in the country from sharing a link to the offending piece over private messenger. ### But allows people to see, for the first time, how horrid our overseers are Twitter, the purest distillation of our social internet, changed the way we think and opened us to all manner of new concerning social possibilities. But it also hugely contributed to the destruction of our pre-existing hegemonic media Death Star. Cultural outcasts often complain about censorship on the app, but the legacy of Twitter under Dorsey is far more a legacy of empowering heretical voices—voices that could not have existed in a socially meaningful way even 20 years ago—than it is a legacy of silence. (Let’s be real: I am writing this piece for a newsletter founded by a former New York Times editor who, in a pre-Twitter universe, would have been shoved out of The Times and never heard from again.) **Twitter liberated information. It empowered the counter-voice. Then, most importantly, it gave our stagnant cultural overseers an outlet to simply tell us, honestly, who they are and what they believe, which was, of course, sufficiently horrifying to free us all from the notion they should retain their position of cultural dominance.** ### On #staywoke According to Jack, staying “woke” meant looking at the world with your own eyes, sharing what you saw, and judging it for yourself. His promise was to empower average people to do these things. Yes, he’s made mistakes along the way. But he delivered on his promise, and it is on this delivered promise his tenure should be judged. Still, against the committed efforts of leaders in media and politics, as well as many of his own employees, defending freedom of expression in a time of ascendent authoritarianism was always a losing battle, or at least along the dimensions of Web 2.0.