Twitter's New 'Civic Integrity Policy' Ahead Of Midterms Proves Need for Elon Musk Takeover

Three months ago, Elon Musk agreed to purchase Twitter in an effort to reinstate free speech on social media. However, with that deal now in limbo as a legal battle ensues, Twitter users could soon log onto an even more restrictive marketplace of ideas.

Thursday, Twitter announced it would enforce a new policy ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. As the arbiter of truth, Twitter will decipher what misinformation is.

The service calls it a civic integrity policy, explaining:

"Twitter is the place to find real-time, reliable information about the 2022 midterms — whether you're looking for breaking news from reporters, information on voting or policy positions from candidates.

"We aim to enable healthy civic conversation on Twitter, while ensuring people have the context they need to make informed decisions about content they encounter."

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Twitter made the editorial decision to suppress a credibly-reported Hunter Biden laptop story. According to a Media Research Center poll, at least 16 percent of voters say they would've voted differently in 2020 had they known about the report.

Nothing to see here -- other than a social media platform interfering in a presidential election and positioning itself to do so again.

Twitter established its interest in the truth during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We point you to Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a former researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health. Twitter suspended her account in 2020 after she published a tweet explaining why she believed coronavirus had originated from a lab in Wuhan.

The platform considered her opinion to be a Donald Trump-propagated, right-wing conspiracy. The Tweet police also took down several other posts that agreed with what became known as the "lab leak theory."

But this never was the kooky myth Twitter pretended it was. Rather, the "anti-science" rebels showed warranted curiosity and skepticism.

Most specifically, a Wall Street Journal report uncovered that three researchers who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab in question, fell ill with COVID-like symptoms in late 2019 as they helped conduct "gain-of-function" research.

In simple terms, researchers at a lab that studies coronaviruses developed the same symptoms -- in the same geographical location -- as patient zero, just weeks before.

At most, Twitter assisted in a global criminal cover-up. At the least, it suppressed credible reporting on the origins of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

The truth hasn't much mattered on Twitter of late. Earlier this year, anonymous employees put popular accounts like the Babylon Bee and Charlie Kirk into Twitter jail for calling Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, a biological male, a male. 

Bill Maher discussed Twitter's track record on political topics during an episode of "Real Time" in May:

"The argument to me is like, has Twitter failed in setting themselves up in the past as the judge of what can go out there? I would say yes. You failed when you threw the New York Post off of Twitter for talking about Hunter Biden's e-mails, and it turned out that was a real story. You failed when you said we couldn't read about whether COVID had come from a lab. You failed!"

This same management team will now decide what theories and reports are reliable before the midterms. The tech execs will calculate whose truths to accept.

To participate in the conversation, Twitter demands compliance with its promoted point of view. The service is a tool for partisan manipulation of the conversation.

As the de-facto town hall of the internet, Twitter has become the Left's greatest form of messaging, the easiest arena to control.

As a platform, not a publisher, Twitter has recklessly policed thoughts as it plays the editor of the internet. Twitter has never been an open service for free-thinking or honest discourse.

Whether Democrats win or lose in 2022 -- and approvals ratings suggest the latter -- Twitter's new civic integrity policy is to their disproportionate advantage. It's as if that's the plan.

The original agreement with Elon Musk was supposed to prevent the very continuation of this transgression. Musk was to take the power of the conversation out of the hands of in-crowd partisans. 

Now, Twitter plans to do what Musk set out to undo during the 2022 midterm elections.