Elon Musk’s Free Speech Takeover Shocks Twitter To Its Core
Twitter’s blue-check praetorian guard shrieked in agony at the announcement that billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk had offered to purchase the company for $43 billion on Thursday morning. All the worst humans imaginable spent the day venting their rage on the platform, predicting varying levels of apocalypse at the prospect of having the site’s notoriously biased censorship rolled back. Musk has made it clear in an interview that his motivations for purchasing the platform are not financial, but instead centered on concerns about free speech and the limitations on discourse the influential social media platform has been placing on America and the wider world.
The tech billionaire has been outspoken in his criticism of how the site conducts itself in relation to censorship. It’s not a secret that the social media giant has a long history of locking, shadow banning, or even outright removing accounts for expressing the wrong political opinions, or banning factual information that contradicts the popular political narratives surrounding issues like Covid or the ongoing debate on transgender ideology, and Musk has seemed particularly concerned about the way in which heavy-handed censorship impacts the democratic process. A position that is entirely justified, especially after the platform infamously locked the account of one of the largest newspapers in the country when it attempted to share shocking revelations about Hunter Biden just a few weeks before the election. That story has since been reluctantly vindicated by other mainstream outlets, but Twitter (as well as Facebook) was happy to block the news at a crucial moment in what was a clear attempt to aid the Regime and manipulate the 2020 American election. They then proceeded to ban the sitting President of the United States, for good measure.
Twitter is not just another social media platform, and both Musk and his opponents are fully aware of this. The micro-blogging site may have a relatively small user base compared to its closest competitors, but what it lacks in volume it more than makes up for in influence. Twitter is the preferred platform for our elites. Journalists and media pundits, i.e. the people responsible for weaving The Narrative that every American is forced to ingest (whether they realize it or not) all operate within the bird app. The site serves as a networking tool and dopamine dispenser for the class charged with controlling what the average person sees, hears, and thinks. But that class has become increasingly terrible at their job, and the only way that Twitter has been able to defend its status is by banning anyone who becomes too effective at challenging the narrative or exposing how embarrassing those who craft it have become.
The reason Elon Musk’s offer is so dangerous to the Regime is that it promises to pry an inept and decadent class of parasites out of their carefully crafted safe spaces and force them to once again face the public they so callously manipulate on a regular basis. The immediate reactions to Musk’s offer were both predictable and hilarious as verified journalists, professors, and various celebrities compared Musk to a Marvel supervillain, a world-ending calamity… and of course Adolf Hitler. The perpetually pro-war and anti-American political pundit Max Boot even went so far as to proclaim that the billionaire represents a danger to the western world because censorship is essential to the defense of democracy.
As glorious as the salty meltdowns were to behold however, there are good reasons for those who oppose the Regime to be skeptical of Musk’s takeover bid. There are questions regarding how the billionaire would finance the massive acquisition as most of his assets are currently tied up in Tesla and SpaceX stock. Rumors have already begun circulating about the SEC and DOJ conducting a joint investigation into Tesla after hearing the news of Musk’s offer to purchase Twitter. In addition, investment groups like the Kingdom Holding Company and The Vanguard Group have acquired large positions in Twitter with the intention of blocking Musk from completing the hostile takeover (though at this moment it is not clear the former has a significant holding in the company).
Yet even if the billionaire was to acquire Twitter, we may not see the radical change that many of us are hoping for. While a rollback of the draconian censorship that plagues the social media site does seem likely, it is unclear how far it would reach. Would banned accounts be restored? Would censored information of all types be allowed to make a return? Would behavior currently deemed ‘hateful’ or ‘harassment’ continue to see moderation? Free speech is a broad term and almost no one has the same definition, so it is hard to know what Musk’s vision would look like once it is actually applied to the site. In addition, the world’s richest man has repeatedly expressed an interest in ending anonymity on the site. While Musk may be able to end censorship on Twitter, he cannot stop retribution for heterodox political opinions in real life. Like it or not, anonymity is a crucial tool that protects the ability of the average person to voice their real opinions, and it is concerning to see someone who seeks to bring free speech back to Twitter speak out against it publicly.
While one can debate the likelihood that our ruling elites will allow Musk to acquire Twitter or what the business mogul would do once he acquired the platform, one thing is for sure: this power play has shaken the Regime to its core. The obvious coordination of multiple corporate entities, government organizations, investment firms, foreign rulers, and media outlets to stop even a single piece of the cultural manufacturing apparatus from falling into the wrong hands has laid bare the deep corruption at the heart of our system. It is hard for our elites to continue to justify their rule through fictions like ‘free enterprise’, ‘democracy’, or ‘the marketplace of ideas’ when they are willing to so blatantly subvert those institutions the moment their power is challenged. Even if this gambit fails, Musk deserves credit for putting the whole rotten mess on display for all to see.
Auron MacIntyre is a YouTuber and recovering journalist.
