(Video: WPTV)
Gov. Ron DeSantis announced during a press conference Tuesday that he may take action against Twitter over its board’s widely panned decision to use a “poison pill” to prevent billionaire investor Elon Musk from acquiring the whole company.
The action would hinge on the fact that the state’s pension fund has money invested in Twitter.
“The state of Florida, and our pension system, we have shares of Twitter. I didn’t buy it. We have people that run the fund. But nevertheless, it hasn’t exactly been great on returns on investment. It’s been pretty stagnant for many, many years,” the governor explained.
Because Florida has an ownership in Twitter, this means the company is liable to the state. And therein, DeSantis continued, lies the strategy by which he could hold the board accountable for injecting a “poison pill” into the company.
“To me, that is probably an injury to the fund, so we’re going to be looking at ways that the state of Florida, potentially, can be holding this Twitter board of directors accountable for breaching their fiduciary duty. So stay tuned on that,” he said.
The remarks came during a broader unrelated press conference in which he also took shots at big tech and big media for trying to prevent Musk’s purchase because it’d weaken their power to silence critics and dissenters.
Listen:
“They’re saying … it’s bad for democracy because Musk believes in free speech. And I’m just thinking to myself, are you kidding me? But that is what they believe. Their view is that they should be able to control the discourse, they should be able to control what you hear and think, they should be able to impose a narrative on our society,” he said.
“And Elon Musk represents a threat to that. And quite frankly, he represents a threat to their power. But all he’s doing is planning to liberate the platform so that people are able to converse, and are able to really hold some of these people accountable for their lies. And so I think that that’s a positive thing that he’s trying to do. I hope the deal ends up going through,” the governor said.
He admitted, though, that most likely, the deal won’t ever go through.
“It seems like it’s probably not, and so we’re gonna look at our options because I think these are really significant issues. I mean, to have a free society where we’re governing ourselves, you really need to have people be able to stand up and speak the truth,” he said.
“And the fact of the matter is that when you’ve had a lot of these big institutions, from media to tech, that have really been corrupted by ideology, they don’t want you speaking the truth. When you speak the truth, that really threatens their position, threatens their power, so they’re going to come after you, and they’re going to use the tools that they have at their disposal to do it,” DeSantis added. “It may mean shutting you up. It may mean kicking you off the platform.”
Which is exactly why Musk has sought to purchase Twitter. He’s a free-speech absolutist who resents the board’s increasingly censorious rulemaking.
During a live TED event last week, he explained exactly what he means when he says he wants a Twitter where free speech is prioritized.
Listen:
“A good sign as to whether there is free speech is, is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? If that is the case, we have free speech. It’s damn annoying when someone you don’t like says something you don’t like. That is the sign of a healthy, functioning free speech situation,” he said.
This is currently not the case on Twitter, where voices who criticize and dissent against the establishment are routinely censored and silenced. Particularly conservative voices, who’ve been suspended over everything from posting satire to saying men are men, though anti-establishment left-wing voices also face censorship.
Most recently, a number of voices on both the left and the right have been silenced for challenging the official narrative about the war in Ukraine, based on the dubious accusation that said voices are “pro-Russian.”
As noted below by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who himself is a non-establishment voice, the unifying factor in virtually all cases of Twitter censorship is it’s designed to protect the establishment narrative, whatever it may be.
Preventing populations from asking who benefits from a protracted proxy war in Ukraine, and who pays the price, is paramount.
A closed propaganda system is vital to achieve that. That’s what explains the unprecedented spate of state/corporate censorship in the West.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 13, 2022
Note: the censorship goes in one direction. Just as “disinformation” was fully permitted as long as it was devoted to propping up Dems and undermining Trump, lies and disinformation are permitted if it serves the NATO cause in Ukraine. Only”pro-Russian”voices are censored. pic.twitter.com/PZRXZbguEv
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 13, 2022
This is an under-discussed fact. Big Tech censorship is not random but always aligned with US foreign policy and DC orthodoxy because monopolies like Google and Amazon have very close ties to the US security state. The censorship regime from them is always imposed with that goal. pic.twitter.com/3Rpi0hKNfJ
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 13, 2022
It just so happens that these days, the establishment narrative is almost always the same narrative being touted by the Democrat Party …
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