Find a few colorful tweets to elevate and quote, and boom — you’ve got a controversy or even a “movement.” It’s especially effective if the tweets support a preferred media narrative, like “MAGA is splitting” or “Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombs in the tent right next to mine.” (The latter, as it turned out, was tweeted from Poland.) And once again, Elon Musk was the man who drew back the curtain. We’ve heard a lot in recent years about “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the Internet, which officials in both the United States and the increasingly totalitarian European Union have used as an excuse to censor ideas they don’t like. Inevitably, the ideas they dislike are those coming from their political opponents. But Musk on Friday didn’t censor people for lying. He revealed them as liars. Rather than repression, he chose illumination. “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” as it says in the New Testament. Or perhaps, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Musk chose transparency over “security,” and in so doing he ripped the masks off tens (hundreds?) of thousands of fake accounts that have been doing real harm to America’s political discourse — without silencing anyone. More effectively, too: Censoring deliberately divisive accounts makes it look like you’re hiding something. Exposing fake ones makes clear who’s doing the hiding. Learn from Elon. He’s a smart guy. Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog. Filed under