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Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk, and the economic billet on "Free Speech"

One of the people who cheered about Musk's Takeover of Twitter is Ben Shapiro, a conservative publisher and YouTube Video host. Shortly after Musk finally bought Twitter and made a PR-stunt to the headquarters with a sink, Shapiro brought this video:

https://yewtu.be/I4dV21O9Nf4

Shapiros arguments he brings here are quite interesting. He mainly mentions two points, why Musks takeover of twitter is good, a business economic argument and a political argument for free speech. However, his priorization of the two arguments is remarkable: While his political argument is only brought in the last two minutes, which is the usual free-speech-anti-woke bullshit, he comments almost the full time of the video on twitters business economics and worker rights.

Useless Workers

Right after the beginning, at 40 seconds, Shapiro makes an unqualified judgement on twitter's working culture before musks takeover [1]:

... because Twitter, as far as I'm aware, has never run on profit ... And you can see why: A video was put up from one of the Twitter employees, showing what a day in their life is like. And let me just say, it looks like a vacation spot. It looks like nobody's doing any work there [laughing] [3] and they all sit around playing fussball all day.

Well, for me it is not that surprising that tech companies are trying to attract and retain high qualified staff by a good working environment with some benefits, but maybe it is for Ben Shapiro. I don't know what Ben Shapiro knows about work and what a typical working day looks like for him. I assume that he, running his own news site and Youtube show, is in a quite privileged position. Anyway, talking about economy, he seems to forget that the Job market is a market not only for companies, but also for employees.

But who needs employees? Shortly after buying Twitter Elon Musk announced to lay off 75% of Twitter's staff. Many Twitter workers reacted with an open letter:

Elon Musk's plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter's ability to serve the public conversation A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our user's and customer's trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation [4].

Regardless which company we are talking about, a lay off in this order of magnitude is something exceptional. Not so for Ben Shapiro:

Wait, wait. So if I buy a company, and I decide that 75% of you are useless, that's worker intimidation? Well, I mean, I feel like all workers should be slightly intimidated that they might do their job if they are useless and not adding to the bottom line productivity of the company. (...) You demand not to be treated as pawns by the people who sign your paycheck? That's called being an employee! Some being a pawn, so you're paid for a job. You're not doing your job - you're going to go away. That's what's happening here.

Wait, wait, Ben, we have to dig in here a little bit. I don't complain here that you don't give a shit on worker's rights, since I din't expect anything else. But let's face some facts: You made this statement on October 27th, right after the takeover. In the meantime Musk fired a significant percentage of the twitter staff, as he said, and many other employees left voluntarily. Unsurprisingly, this caused chaos and insecurity in Twitter's daily business [5], as the twitter employees warned. It turns out, that twitter got into trouble losing that much employees. You claim that these people were useless from an economical point of view, but from a technical point of view they definitely weren't. What does that mean?

The consistent conclusion here would be, that actually Twitter itself as a company is useless, since it is not profitable. However, Shapiro doesn't argue this way. Als already mentioned he clearly states at the end of the video, that Twitter is important for the United States and Free speech. So what is the point of the whole economic brute-force-capitalist argument?

Free speech, economically culled

If we apply Hanlon's Razor [6] here, we could simply assume, that Shapiros argumentation is inconsistent and pointless, since he is just a dumbass talker. That would be a fair estimation. Nevertheless, in this case I tend not to follow this assumption here, since I know how these "free Speech" advocates actually tick. They claim to stand for open discussions and exchange of different views, but actually just want to get their own views expressed without dissent. They claim to "end censorship" while actujally banning their critics. Elon Musk has demopnstrated many times, how he actually deals with critics on twitter.

The economic argument is just a cheap weapon to silence critics in the first place. Twitter Employees who criticize the new leader are just useless parasites to be fired. Free speech is such a pleasure, especially when these annoying critics remain silent for keeping their job and affording their paycheck.

Footnotes

[1] Yes, I did the hard work to transcribe a few sentences of this steam chatterer for this gemlog article. Was it worth the effort? [2]

[2] Yes, definitely. More on this in a future post.

[3] I know, it is disrespectful to do this, but I got this nice screenshot of Ben Shapiro's face laughing while talking, at minute 1:16.

[4] Screenshot of the open letter shown in Ben Shapiro's video.

[5] heise online: Twitter-Chaos: Erste technische Probleme, mehr wegbrechende Werbeeinnahmen

[6] Hanlon's razor (Wikipedia)

Feel free to respond or comment via e-mail:

300nm@derschwarzestrahler.at

CC BY-SA 4.0 Martin Marot-Perz, 21.12.2022

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