To Twitter’s Elon Musk fanboys and fangirls: Chill out | Opinion

On Sunday, I wrote a column criticizing Twitter in general and the capricious way that Elon Musk is running the thing since he bought it.

I apparently should have included a trigger warning for the local Elon fanboy/fangirl community. Sorry about that.

It generated over 300 comments on our website and Facebook page, so I figured I’ll answer them here.

First off, let me remind everybody that I never liked Twitter for a variety of reasons, No. 1 among them being the way the service has dumbed down both American journalism and the general public consumption of real news.

The comments criticizing my column can mostly be grouped into two categories:

▪ Unquestioning acceptance of Musk’s contention that journalists were removed for “doxxing” the exact location of his personal jet in real time, exposing his child to danger from a stalker.

▪ Something something Hunter Biden’s laptop something.

Let’s take them in order.

Doxxing: There was a confrontation between a Musk family bodyguard and a suspected stalker out in the Los Angeles area last week.

But subsequent police investigation has shown that it had nothing to do with a site that uses publicly available information to track movements of Musk’s private jet, which Musk banned from Twitter along with the journalists who cover him.

The Washington Post found that the stalking incident took place 23 hours after the @elonjet account had last located his plane at Los Angeles International Airport.

The confrontation was at a gas station in South Pasadena, 25 miles from the airport. Those aren’t like easy Kansas miles. I lived and worked in the Pasadena area for years and take it from me, the airport is practically the other side of the world.

The suspected stalker works as a food delivery driver and apparently believed that the mother of two of Musk’s children, the musician known as Grimes, had been sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts. That, and that Elon was tracking his movements and interfering with his Uber Eats career.

Blaming journalists for that because they posted links to the Twitter-banned plane-tracking site doesn’t pass the laugh test. Musk has since reinstated some of the journalists and suspended others. But his message is clear, go easy on me or face the ban hammer.

Hunter Biden’s laptop: Twitter was all abuzz early this month after Musk released e-mails of an internal debate at Twitter, under the previous management, over suppressing a New York Post story about an abandoned laptop containing damaging information on Hunter Biden, president Biden’s son.

Yep, that happened. For two days, a month before the 2020 election.

At the time, there were serious questions about the authenticity of the story, which was shopped around to various news outlets by Rudy Giuliani, who wasn’t exactly a pillar of credibility at the time. Even Fox News passed.

Since then, Twitter’s former CEO admitted that blocking the Post story was the wrong call and apologized. The Federal Election Commission, (three Republicans, three Democrats and an independent) ruled unanimously that Twitter didn’t violate campaign law.

Ironically, the people most critical of Twitter suppressing the laptop story are the very same ones who are now using the very same line of reasoning to justify Musk suppressing journalists: It’s a private company and they can do what they want.

I did make one error of omission in my earlier column. When I listed tweets I’d accidentally retweeted while swiping away pesky notifications, I missed Keith Olbermann. I followed him years ago when he was on ESPN and his alerts still pop up on my phone frequently. For the record, I’m not endorsing or opposing anything Olbermann has to say, unless it’s about baseball.

The only time I ever wrote anything about Olbermann was 13 years ago. I took him to task in 2009 for making fun of Wichita over hosting a conservative Republican Tea Party bus tour at the Lawrence-Dumont Stadium parking lot (his sneering emphasis, not mine).

In a political blog we had back then, I asked the obvious question: Where would you hold a political rally centered around a touring bus, if not in a parking lot?

Rest assured my views on Twitter remain unchanged. I didn’t like it before Musk. I don’t like it after Musk.

That’s not a political statement, it’s a statement on how the platform’s organized (poorly) and the quality of its content (mostly junk).

See you on Facebook.