When it started to look as if Donald Trump were going to beat out former
first lady Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016, celebrities started
vowing left and right that they would move to Canada if he actually did.
(Oh, that they had kept their word … but that’s a separate issue.)
Now that Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, more celebrities are making
similar vows to leave the platform for greener pastures like Instagram and
TikTok.
I call them “greener pastures” because we all know what makes grass
green — fertilizer. And when a group of leftist elites run content
moderation the way they do on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and so forth,
they tend to create a fertilizer-rich environment.
I’m sure that’s not how either the content moderation teams or the celebs
who worship them think of it, but honestly I think most of these folks make
a lot more of their decisions based on feeling rather than thinking anyway.
At any rate, according to NBC News, here is the list as it currently stands of
celebrities who apparently fear free speech, don’t know how to block
offensive content on Twitter, or both:
Bareilles, as you may know (I didn’t) wrote and performed “Love Song,”
which I find annoying but at least I’ve heard of it. (Admittedly, I haven’t
been much of a fan of pop music since Duran Duran’s “Electric
Barbarella.”)
It’s only been a couple of days, but so far Bareilles has remained true to her
word. That “I’m out” tweet on Sunday appears to be the last one from her
account. For now, anyway.
Singer Toni Braxton declared to the world that she doesn’t understand at
all how free speech works when she announced that she, too, would be
leaving the Musk-owned social media platform.
Note to Braxton: Free speech protections that exclude what some people
find hateful are not free speech protections. As an artist who works with
the spoken word, I would think you’d pay more attention to that sort of
argument.
I would have expected former professional wrestler Mick Foley — you may
know him better as Cactus Jack, Mankind or Dude Love if you’re a fan — to
be tougher than a pair of musicians, but I would have been wrong. He
declared in a Facebook post Friday (his Twitter account seems to have been
deleted) that he was leaving as well, at least for a while.