Elon Musk has an agreement to buy Twitter. But no one can agree on what that means, and Bill Maher’s HBO show Real Time spent a good portion of Friday’s run trying to make sense of it.
Maher stated in his monologue that Musk has promised to get rid of bots on the social media service. That allegedly prompted Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to ask, “Why are you making it personal?”
Musk is at least having fun with his soon-to-be new toy, Maher noted. He tweeted out earlier that his next task would be to buy Coca-Cola and put the cocaine back in the formula. “Sure, it’s all fun and games, until Hunter Biden gets his head stuck in the vending machine,” Maher wryly noted.
Later, during the panel portion of the show, Maher again brought up Twitter to MSNBC host Ali Vashi and former Democratic Senator from Alabama Doug Jones.
Maher started with a quote from Twitter’s current CEO, where he said that “Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment.” Maher said that was a dodgy answer.
Vashi noted that it’s time for Twitter and Facebook to have a conversation with themselves about whether they are making our shaky democracy worse by their current actions. Jones, though, claimed “Russian bots don’t have a First Amendment privilege.”
Maher fired back. He claimed Twitter has failed in whether it can be the ultimate content judge in its aspiration to be a town square forum. They achieved that dubious status by censoring stories on Hunter Biden and the laboratory origins of Covid-19. He brought up a Babylon Bee video that was knocked off the service as an example of scolds who disapprove of even the slightest satire.
“This is well within what satire has always been,” Maher said of he Bee’s work. “Flagging shows a complete lack of judgment. You have failed.”
Jones wasn’t totally buying it, blamng “insensitivity, flat-out lies, fake news and things that insight violence” for the heavy handed approach.
“Twitter became a left-wing place. It just did,” Maher insisted.
“Thre’s a lot of right wing garbage on it,” Jones countered.
Maher then pointed out the standard for whether something amounts to free speech these days is whether it passes the bar for “you hurt my feelings.”
Earlier, author Fran Lebowitz joined Maher for a laid-back conversation about he trip to Europe (“All the men wore long pants”) and the relationships between Harry and Meghan and Amber Heard and Johnny Depp.
