I have something of a love-hate relationship with Elon Musk. On the one hand, his flagship Tesla company only survives courtesy of rent-seeking on a colossal scale. If the raft of government subsidies were removed, the company would vanish under a mountain of debt overnight.
On the other hand, his achievements with SpaceX are remarkable. In just years, the company has put the moribund government space sector in its place, and slashed the cost of payload-to-orbit, which hadn’t budged since the 1960s.
Besides, the man is a living meme. Whether it’s smoking a blunt on The Joe Rogan Experience or winding up geriatric socialists like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Now, he’s taking on the behemoth of Big Tech censorship, Twitter.
He has caused havoc with his Twitter account. Now Elon Musk has signalled his intention to change the social media company, having become the largest shareholder with a board seat.
One of Twitter’s most controversial figures, with more than 80 million followers, the world’s richest man acquired a 9.2 per cent stake in the company this week and promised “significant improvements”.
9.2% mightn’t sound like much, but it makes Musk the single largest shareholder in the company and puts him on the board.
Musk’s appointment stoked expectations that the social media platform faced an overhaul. “Now it’s time to get out the popcorn,” said Daniel Ives, a technology analyst at Wedbush Securities.
One of the first signs of change was Musk’s poll tweet, asking if Twitter should have an edit button — long a bugbear for users. With some 4.5 million votes cast, the “yes” vote is nearing 75%.
But it’s the issue of free speech that has many users really excited. Twitter is notorious for censoring free speech, not just banning conservative voices willy-nilly, but most shockingly when it banned the New York Post from reporting its investigations into Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Last week, Musk tweeted a poll, stating that “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” 70% of users — Twitter users, remember — responded in the negative.
Musk followed that up by asking, “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?” This time, Twitter’s mostly leftist user base showed their true free speech colours, most of them resorting to the flawed leftist argument that “Twitter isn’t the government, so it’s not censorship”. This shows, if nothing else, just how little the left truly understands free speech.
His investment in Twitter prompted supporters of Donald Trump to call on Musk to intervene in the case of the former president, who had his account suspended in January 2021 after his supporters attacked the US Capitol. “It’s time to lift the political censorship,” Lauren Boebert, a Republican congresswoman from Colorado, said.
The Australian
Free speech social media platform Gab was founded as a direct response to Twitter’s regime of censorship. Gab founder Andrew Torba responded to Musk’s appointment to the Twitter board.
Anything that promotes more speech and not less is a good thing in our book. I personally hope that Elon has a positive impact by lobbying to remove all of the mentally ill people who run Twitter so they can get the professional help they desperately need […]
Perhaps this change will be good for Twitter and good for free speech, but Elon should know that he is up against an entrenched toxic culture of wokeness at that company. He has a long uphill battle ahead of him. There is also the question of how much time can he dedicate to completely rebuilding Twitter while also running SpaceX and Tesla. I guess we are about to find out.
Gab News
Torba also included a sobering reminder that Musk is far from the first person to try to take on Twitter.
Elon isn’t the first billionaire to help expand the market that Gab founded almost six years ago. The billionaire Mercer family tried and failed to take down Gab with Parler. The Chinese billionaire Miles Gao tried and failed to take down Gab with Gettr. Even billionaire President Donald Trump tried and failed with Truth Social.
No company is too big to fail (where, after all, are the East India Company, or Anaconda Copper?), so Twitter is not simply unassailable. The real question that must be asked is whether social media is simply toxic by its very nature.
