On the latest episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Shapiro analyzes and reacts to the controversy surrounding Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman airing on Twitter.
The buzz surrounding Twitter employees restricting the documentary, followed by CEO Elon Musk promoting the film led to record-breaking viewers, creating the coveted Streisand effect, which Musk optimistically noted may happen in the wake of the controversy.
“Elon Musk, to his great credit, decided to take off the clamps and now the stats on how many people have seen What is Women are absolutely astounding,” Shapiro said. “The number of video impressions on What is Woman, the tweet that we put out there at Elon Musk and he tweeted himself, and then pinned at the top of his account, 171 million impressions which means, in the very least, tens and tens of millions of people have seen the actual documentary making it by any metric perhaps the most watched documentary in the history of humanity.”
Shapiro then gave an example of the scale at which What is a Woman has been viewed.
“For example, this documentary has more views than Anderson Cooper’s show all week, combined on CNN. And the 2023 Oscars, and Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address, and Lizzo‘s most recent music video special, which is four months old, and over the course of like 48 hours 72 hours over the weekend. More viewers in the Game of Thrones finale.”
His monologue goes on to explain the hunger for truth Americans are feeling in our current media landscape. Shapiro analyzes the outsized reaction to the documentary, pointing out how censorship only makes people more adamant about honesty.
“These are huge numbers because people want to engage with the truth. They are sick of being told lies, and these are bigger numbers than the numbers on massive documentaries like Making a Murderer from Netflix, which had over 19 million views over the course of five weeks.”