After many critics of Twitter owner Elon Musk had their accounts suspended on Thursday and NBC News opted to pull Ben Collins from the tech beat, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy shared some thoughts about what has transpired over the last few days.
What began the discussions regarding speech on the social media platform came after the accounts belonging to Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster were all suspended.
Twitter and Musk later restored these accounts, but it didn’t prevent Darcy from taking a shot at the social media platform’s owner.
“Musk & the right have for years claimed to be free speech maximalists,” Darcy said on Twitter Saturday. “Now Musk has openly censored the press after being triggered by some news coverage and the right is largely cheering him on. No one has a right to be on a private company’s platform. But the hypocrisy is rich.”
Darcy’s criticism didn’t stop there, as the CNN reporter had a follow-up response on Sunday after Twitter rolled out more rules regarding “accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms.”
“Funny how so many of those right-wing speech warriors are not up in arms about Musk’s brazen attempts to control the conversation and censor/ban those who dissent,” Darcy said. “Musk is — unintentionally — exposing a large part of that movement for what it really is.”
Eduardo Razo is the Assistant Content Editor for BNM, which includes writing daily news stories on the news media industry. He can be found on Twitter @eddierazo_ or you can reach him by email at eddie1991razo@gmail.com.
