MEDIAWATCH: AI Bryce goes full alt-Right Elon Musk on Andrea Vance’s Twitter virtue signal

The man who still claims Chris Trotter is left wing, AI Bryce (we call him that because he’s admitted to using AI enhancement to write his posts), the great transparency campaigner has gone full Elon Musk on Andrea Vance’s Twitter virtue signal and we are here with the pop corn…

THE QUESTIONABLE RETREAT FROM SOCIAL MEDIA

Last week, New Zealand’s Parliament ceased using X. The Clerk of the House, David Wilson, unilaterally decided the institution would no longer have a presence on the platform formerly known as Twitter. His stated reason was that he “could no longer support” X because of its AI chatbot Grok and reports about deepfake imagery. “It didn’t feel right for my organisation to use a platform that allowed that to happen,” he told Stuff.

This came shortly after Andrea Vance’s Sunday Star-Times column headlined “Every official tweet is a nod to child abuse,” which called for public organisations and politicians to leave the platform. The timing was not coincidental.

Parliament’s departure provoked immediate backlash from government ministers, the Free Speech Union, and ordinary New Zealanders who still use X. Foreign Minister Winston Peters called it out in typically blunt fashion: “This is how freedoms are lost — by unilateral decision making being made by moral virtue signalling — where someone seeks to do one thing but causes damage to other freedoms”.

He was right to be concerned. What we are witnessing is not a neutral administrative decision. It is a political gesture: an announcement of liberal principle dressed up as a child safety measure. And it is a mistake.

THE MORALISM OF THE ANTI-X CAMPAIGN

Vance’s piece was striking in its moral absolutism. She described X as “the digital equivalent of a crime scene” and called Elon Musk a “ketamine-addled megalomaniac.” She argued that any politician who continued to use the platform was offering “tacit endorsement” of child sexual abuse material. “Every official post on X is a signal that it is credible and legitimate,” she wrote.

This is a masterclass in guilt by association, and in the kind of liberal, middle-class moralising that has come to dominate parts of our media landscape. By Vance’s logic, using X makes you complicit in the worst things that happen on the platform. The argument reduces to: if you’re still on X, you’re either ignorant or immoral.

Bryce Edwards Facebook

…let me see if I can get this completely straight, you know, for the purposes of Transparency.

Andrea Vance has done a giant woke middle class virtue signal over Twitter, which is fine because we desperately need as many woke Wellington middle class identity politics activists OFF Twitter and onto Bluesky where they can scream into their padded echo chambers and stop driving men away from the Left, so we support Andrea Vance’s wanky virtue signal in the hope more middle class wokesters leave every platform that generates attention because all they do is drive male voters into the arms of the reactionary right – but AI Bryce is roasting her for having a wanky opinion.

Now.

One argument Vance pushes is that Twitter has become a vile cesspool pit of misinformation, THE VERY TYPE OF MISINFORMATION that AI Bryce indulged in last week when he was platforming the lie that Tamatha Paul was to blame for Moa Point because she voted for a cycleway…

The most prominent political figure drawn into the sewage debate so far is Tamatha Paul, the former Green councillor and now Wellington Central MP. Peter Bassett’s widely-shared blog post accused Paul of moving a 2021 Long-Term Plan (LTP) amendment that nearly doubled the cycleway budget to $226 million while the most ambitious wastewater renewal option was passed over. Paul’s amendment, seconded by Jill Day (now Labour Party president), passed 9-5, with every Labour and Green councillor voting in favour.

AI Bryce

…turns out that entire argument is a lie based on right wing hate troll propaganda – propaganda that AI Bryce himself was promoting!

Where is AI Bryce’s climb down for promoting a blog by a right wing hate troll that was utterly false?

Is AI Bryce going full Elon Musk on Andrea Vance for her Twitter Virtue Signal because Andrea Vance was the journalist who broke the story that AI Bryce’s transparency project had mysteriously shut down?

The transparency project that went dark: Inside the collapse of Bryce Edwards’ Integrity Institute

Launching his lobbying and influence register, Bryce Edwards promised “a new era of scrutiny” – two years of research and investigative reporting designed to drag the country’s back-room power brokers into the light.

Nine months later, the Integrity Institute he directed has been wound up, removed from the Charitable Trusts Register, and left behind a trail of missed reports, employment disputes, and unanswered questions.

The Institute grew out of Edwards’ Victoria University–aligned Democracy Project. It was launched early this year to map lobbying, donations, and elite political networks.

The Post

Watching AI Bryce go full Elon does put into question his own daily list of content because now he’s so personally invested in supporting the alt-Right, it’s less an academic list of important perspectives, it’s now a culture war cudgel to promote alt-Right perspectives and not genuine debate.

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