Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk criticized Bari Weiss, one of the journalists to whom he gave the “Twitter files,” on Friday after she criticized his decision to suspend the accounts of several journalists who covered him.
“Rather than rigorously pursuing truth, you are virtue-signaling to show that you are ‘good’ in the eyes of media elite to keep one foot in both worlds,” Musk tweeted, after Weiss did not respond to a question about her views.
Weiss, together with Matt Taibbi, Abigail Shrier, and Michael Shellenberger, was invited by Musk to expose the company’s previous censorship in an ongoing series that has become known as the “#TwitterFiles.” Weiss used the opportunity to launch a new media outlet, The Free Press. But on Friday, a day after Musk suspended a slew of journalists who either published his location or linked to a banned account that posted the location of his jet, Weiss tweeted that the “new regime” at Twitter has the same problems as the old one in terms of censorship.
She continued:
Musk replied with a question about what she would do if her own, or her child’s, location were posted online:
After Weiss did not respond, Musk followed up with a critical tweet, indicating an evident sense of betrayal:
Weiss’s colleague, Abigail Shrier, took a different point of view, defending Musk’s decision in a Substack essay:
Whether Musk is in fact a free-speech warrior or simply a self-interested CEO with incomprehensible power to shape public debate remains to be seen. But those of us who published pieces about the Twitter Files never claimed nor implied he was a “free speech warrior.” Musk himself did.
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So is suspending the journalists, as Musk did in the last twenty four hours, the first indication that the new regime is as bad as the old? Doubtful. That Musk is no “free speech warrior” after all? Maybe.
And perhaps Musk will ultimately resort to suppression of opinion he dislikes. In that event, he will face a flood of opprobrium, including from me. But Twitter’s new rule against posting real-time coordinates of famous people is a good one.
Weiss was vehemently anti-Trump in the 2016 election. She moved with colleague Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times before encountering hostility and intolerance among the Times‘ staff. She then launched an independent media career, publishing on Substack and recording her own podcast.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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