4:15:22

"I stole their hero status."

-Nurse Erin Marie Olzewski

Matt Taibbi on the future of Twitter, democracy, free press, and how far we've moved away from the core American ideals of free speech. Censorship and propaganda are at the very heart of neoliberalism:

"In every newsroom I’ve ever been around, there’s always one sad hack who’s hated by other reporters but hangs on to a job because he whispers things to management and is good at writing pro-war editorials or fawning profiles of Ari Fleischer or Idi Amin or other such distasteful media tasks. Once, however, even that person would never have been willing to publicly say something as gross as, 'For democracy to survive, it needs more censorship'! A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.

Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but rather as people who live inside the rope-lines and defend those pieties. I’m guessing the reaction to this latest news is arousing special horror because the current version of Twitter is the professional journalist’s idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn’t exist, everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled ('age-restricted' content is seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks."

Welcome to today's Western democracy, 45 years later