It’s hard not to notice that the amount of content generated in anticipation of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter outpaced the amount of content generated in the wake of this week’s leak of the upcoming Supreme Court decision that will overturn Roe v. Wade, at least as far as I could tell. There are some obvious and legitimate reasons why this could be the case (and some obvious and unjust ones), but one thing that sticks in my mind that is Roe and abortion are the subjects of a very different political and cultural battle than Elon and “free speech.” If the “‘free speech’ vs. ‘SJWs’” culture war splits Twitter users and Times subscribers (two heavily overlapping groups that I am using as a proxy for “elite participants in ‘the conversation’”) more or less cleanly down the middle into two opposed camps of equal size, my guess is that the issue of abortion rights (which I really hesitate to call a “culture war” issue) produces a much less even split. I’d bet that a large majority of Times subscribers and Twitter users are supporters of abortion rights, which makes for a much less punchy “conversation” and consequently a somewhat smaller appetite for total coverage.
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