The concept of internet privacy is a lost one as the advancement of technology, along with a profit motive to capture as much data as possible, has made privacy an impossible expectation.
Admittedly, I’ve never fully read any of the Terms of Services (TOS) for my applications, because it’s filled with legal jargon that isn’t meant for a layman such as myself to understand. Like most people, I’ve accepted that my information, while utilizing applications and websites, is mostly not mine, and protecting it from being sold to the highest bidder is an uphill battle that’s nearly impossible to fight.
However, it’s one thing to expect that your cookie data will be sold to a third-party vendor for the purpose of selling you products that you’d likely want to buy, but it’s another thing when the government has direct access to private information between its citizens.
In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Twitter CEO Elon Musk brought to light something that many active Twitter users were oblivious to, which was how vulnerable their private conversations were to the US government.
Musk admitted to Carlson, "The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind. I was not aware of that."
"Would that include people’s DMs?" Carlson asked Musk, to which he replied: "Yes. Because the DMs aren't encrypted.”
Musk’s ambition is to implement encryption technology to keep users’ private conversations free from being intercepted and prevent the security state from spying on its international user base.
"If I got something that was unconstitutional from the US government, my reply would be to send them a copy of the First Amendment and just say, 'What part of this are we getting wrong?'" Musk adamantly stated.
With every outrageous reveal about Twitter 1.0 via the “Twitter Files” and Musk’s own testimony, the public is now finally able to understand what this social media platform was prior to Musk’s takeover: Twitter was the security state’s spying and censorship apparatus fronting as a town-square-style communication platform.
With Twitter functioning as a centralized communication platform for the most influential and powerful people in the world, and with Twitter’s enthusiasm to appease the demands of US federal agencies, Twitter became one of the government’s greatest espionage tools.
Musk’s transparency about the platform’s vulnerability only provides more questions without the possibility of gaining the answers for them.
From a journalistic standpoint, were any of our conversations leaked to the government, potentially giving up sensitive source information or the identification of confidential sources? Is it possible the government has information they could use to blackmail celebrities and officials?
What worries me is the lack of outrage that I’m seeing from people who are seemingly okay with this intrusion, simply because they feel they have nothing to hide, or they inherently believe the government always has good intentions. Even many of our journalists aren’t concerned with this intrusion because Musk is the one who is revealing it, and he’s currently their billionaire villain.
Mainstream media’s left-wing pundits and journalists doubled down on dismissing the importance of the Twitter Files revelations as being a partisan concern that only benefits one side, and now they have no choice but to disregard this revelation instead of holding the government’s feet to the fire with legitimate concerns.
Hubris and partisanship have dominated journalism, casting aside their need for curiosity. Journalists are supposed to seek out areas of overreach by powerful institutions, not cover for their malicious activities because it’s politically advantageous to ignore them.
When journalists refuse to hold the people who reign at the top of our society accountable because they happen to occasionally say things we like or affiliate with a political party we coincidentally vote for, then we are complicit in our society’s downward spiral.
When the fourth estate fails, the second estate succeeds.
