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Michael Shellenberger

Leighton Woodhouse

Beige Luciano-Adams

Alex Gutentag

and 3 others

Jun 2, 2023

Over the last week, the conservative news site The Daily Wire has been promoting the free, Thursday premiere of its full-length documentary film about transgenderism, “What Is A Woman.”

We at Public were closely watching the launch since we are considering releasing our own two forthcoming documentary films, “The Censorship Files” and “San Fransicko,” on Twitter.

One of the most significant and least known of Twitter owner Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter is its ability to broadcast entire feature-length movies, which is potentially game-changing, particularly now that YouTube is increasingly censoring videos on everything from Covid to transgenderism.

But when it finally premiered, Twitter slapped a warning label, “hateful conduct,” on it and prevented people from being able to re-tweet it.

The move shocked and upset Musk’s many online fans, including the Daily Wire, which had just announced not only the streaming of its films on Twitter, but a much broader engagement with the platform.

The move was, on the one hand, surprising. Musk is an outspoken critic of doctors performing genital modification surgeries upon, and sterilizing, children. On the other hand, there has been a great concern among many free speech defenders that Musk’s choice of CEO, Linda Yaccarino, would bend to the will of Woke advertisers and impose censorship, just as YouTube has done. It demonetized Walsh for his views on transgenderism.

At 10 pm ET, Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boering tweeted out a photo of himself and its stars: Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, Walsh, and Candace Owens, huddling backstage at the Daily Wire’s studio in Nashville and staring at their phones — and presumably at Twitter, where they were all tweeting angrily about the censorship, and pleading with Musk to do the right thing.

“A terrible day,” tweeted Boering, “but nice to be in the fox hole with the best team in the business fighting for what we believe in.”

Then, at 8:28 pm, Ian Miles Cheong, who frequently interacts with Twitter owner Elon Musk, tweeted that Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety, Ella Irwin, had resigned.

Many speculated that Musk had fired Irwin for the censoring of “What Is a Woman.”

But Twitter was still throttling the film two hours later.

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