In the latest of her Please Explain cartoons, Pauline Hanson tackles the keyboard warriors. As the class tries to enter the room to hold a debate, they’re blocked by three keyboard warriors, who accuse them of hurting their feelings. Hanson ultimately shows the class that they can simply walk past the keyboard warriors, because they have no real power.
That’s not entirely true, as even Hanson should know. As she references in the cartoon itself, “Last week’s class was cancelled”. This is a reference to the previous episode of Please Explain, regarding election fraud — which was scrubbed from Facebook and other platforms for “misinformation”.
The power of keyboard warriors is far beyond their actual numbers. As investigations into the online lobby group “Sleeping Bullies Giants” have shown, they often consist of little more than a handful of activists. But those activists each have dozens of “sock puppet” accounts. A “sock puppet” is when the same person registers multiple accounts under different names and email addresses. Those small numbers of activists then flood advertisers and HR managers with what appears to be hundreds of complaints.
So, what’s to be done about these bullies?
Elon Musk called for an investigation into left-wing organizations that are pressuring companies to boycott Twitter if Musk changes the social media firm’s content moderation policies, coming about a week after it was announced he would purchase the platform.
It comes as about two dozen left-wing groups reportedly sent letters to Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Disney to boycott Twitter after Musk’s purchase. Those groups include Black Lives Matter Network Foundation, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Women’s March, Media Matters for America, and GLAAD.
The group jointly wrote that “as top advertisers on Twitter, your brand risks association with a platform amplifying hate, extremism, health misinformation, and conspiracy theorists,” according to the letter. “Under Musk’s management, Twitter risks becoming a cesspool of misinformation, with your brand attached, polluting our information ecosystem in a time where trust in institutions and news media is already at an all-time low.”
This is the classic keyboard warrior gambit. Pose as the supposed voice of a concerned public, make up bogus accusations, and panic risk-averse corporations into pulling money from anyone the keyboard warriors don’t like.
It’s an evolution of the lawfare fundraising tactic used by leftist activists in the 80s. In that case, the SOP was to accuse a rich corporation, often banks, of “racism”. Although the accusations were clearly spurious, it was simply more expedient for the corporations to hand over go-away money, rather than spend months in legal fights, with the media guaranteed to take the side of the lying activists and smear the corporation’s image.
Even that was an evolution of the first fund-raising tactic pioneered by black power and Weather Underground activists in the 70s: outright robbery. Black power groups tended to rob nightclubs and drug dealers in black neighbourhoods. The white student radicals targeted banks.
If nothing, at least the 70s radicals were more honest.
But Elon Musk is nobody’s soft target.
In response, Musk called for an investigation into those groups.
“Who funds these organizations that want to control your access to information? Let’s investigate …” Musk wrote on Twitter. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Last week, the Tesla CEO wrote that attacks against his character were “coming thick and fast” but mostly “from the left, which is no surprise.”
As free speech groups and media have found, the only way to make yourself cancel-proof is to not rely on advertising revenue at all. Moving to a subscriber model means that the only people you have to please are the people who like what you have to sell — free speech and open information — in the first place.
It seems that Musk is leaning toward that model.
Meanwhile, Musk wrote Tuesday that might charge corporate or government accounts a small fee.
“Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users,” he wrote.
Of course, the same leftists who are threatening to leave Twitter if it becomes a free speech platform are also threatening to leave if it moves to a subscription model. I very much doubt that Musk will make basic Twitter accounts a paid feature — that would almost certainly be commercial suicide. But charging commercial or institutional users, or even offering a premium service with added functionality for paid subscribers, would be a much more sound idea.
In the meantime, Musk is making all the right noises.
“However I should be clear that the right will probably be a little unhappy too,” Musk continued. “My goal is to maximize area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the ~80% of people in the middle.”
The Epoch Times
If you’re pissing off the extremists on both sides, you’re probably doing just right.