When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and lifted the bans on accounts run by highly influential Americans accused of spreading misinformation (largely about the 2020 election, COVID-19 vaccines and the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass murder) — notably Donald Trump and Alex Jones — the mega-billionaire claimed his reason for restoring these accounts lay in his belief in First Amendment rights and principles.
Since then Musk has gone further in eliminating content controls and moderation, turning X into place where the only fact-checking is done through a “community notes” feature that relies on other users to correct errors or counter assertions and misrepresentations — often only after the questionable content has been broadly amplified.
X has led the way — blazing a path Mark Zuckerberg‘s Meta is now following — to effectively cut out media gatekeepers and journalistic or ethical standards, replacing these with a sort of “free speech” free-for-all with few guardrails.
The effect pleases Musk — to judge from his boasts about the X effect — and he has continued to slam mainstream media for what he characterizes as its woke, Liberal, anti-Trump bias.
Musk’s solution for combatting this alleged media bias has been to urge users of his X platform to become “citizen journalists.” Musk told his X users: “You are the media now.”
This weekend, Trump’s incoming “Border Czar” Tom Homan — former Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the first Trump administration — suggested that he wants to similarly deputize citizens — as informants and ICE assistants.
Saying he wants to establish a hotline for Americans to call and report undocumented immigrants who they believe have committed crimes in their communities, Homan said of American citizens: “We want to give them an opportunity to be a part of the fix.”
[NOTE: The suggested program — Americans delivering info to authorities about perceived suspicious activities — has many precursors, with a notable recent example being a law in Texas promising $10,000 to citizens who report abortions — a scenario covered in a New York Times article tellingly entitled “Citizens, Not the State, Will Enforce New Abortion Law in Texas.”]
Will bad information be passed on the hotline and “collateral arrests” made as a result of Homan’s initiative? Homan acknowledged during an NBC interview that Trump’s mass deportation plan would include “collateral arrests” of undocumented immigrants without criminal records. (Of course, being undocumented is itself technically a crime.)
Homan also said he wants to hold weekly press briefings with updates on ramped-up deportations, which will include workplace roundups and family detentions.
Note: Last month principals in the New York City school system received a memo from Deputy Chancellor and COO Emma Vadehra reminding them of the protocol for what to do if ICE agents show up at a school. (Call a school system lawyer and “wait for further instructions.”)
Vadehra told the New York Times that the school system does not ask families about their immigration status and, if a school employee does have information about a student’s status, it “may not be entered in any school records and must be kept confidential.”