Last night on HBO Real time with Bill Maherthe host dove into billionaire Elon Musk’s recent deal to buy social media platform Twitter.
Maher mentioned in his opening monologue that one of Musk’s promises after acquiring the platform was to get rid of bot accounts. He joked that this prompted Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to ask, “Why the personal date?”
He continued his jokes by referring to a tweet sent by Musk as a joke that his next decision would be to buy Coca-Cola and put the cocaine back in the formula. “Of course, it’s all entertainment and games, until Hunter Biden gets his head stuck in the vending machine,” Maher joked.
MSNBC host Ali Vashi and former Alabama Democratic senator Doug Jones then joined Maher on his panel where Twitter was again mentioned.
Maher read a quote from the current CEO of Twitter, where he once said that “our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment.” Maher noted that this statement is particularly vague.
Vashi said he thinks it’s time for Twitter and Facebook to have a conversation with each other about how they affect our democracy with their actions. Jones, however, argued that “Russian bots don’t have First Amendment privilege.”
Maher disputed this. He claimed that Twitter had failed when it came to successfully filtering out misinformation on the platform. Perhaps their biggest failure to date, he claimed, was the censorship of stories about Hunter Biden and COVID-19 from a lab. He released a mildly satirical Babylon Bee video that was taken down by Twitter for being too sensitive.
“It fits well with what satire has always been,” Maher said of the bee’s work. “The report shows a complete lack of judgement. You failed.”
Jones argued that it’s the fault of “the callousness, outright lies, fake news and things that reveal violence” for the platform to take an authoritarian approach.
“Twitter has become a left-wing site. It just happened,” Maher insisted.
Jones countered, however, “There’s a lot of right-wing garbage out there.”
Maher then concluded that the bar for free speech these days is simply set at “you hurt me.”
Michael is a music and TV addict with a passion for most things that aren’t complete and utter boredom. You can follow him on Twitter — @Tweetskoor
Flux Real time with Bill Maher sur HBO Max
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