It may be harder than he expects to do away with moderation. Boycotts by advertisers may not bother him. But Twitter’s app relies on distribution by Apple and Google, while governments are tightening laws on online speech
ELON MUSK, the world’s richest man, has described Twitter as the “de facto public town square”. On April 25th he struck a deal to take it private in what will be one of the largest leveraged buy-outs in history. Mr Musk, the boss of companies including Tesla, a carmaker, and SpaceX, an aerospace firm, put together an all-cash offer worth about $44bn. He is stumping up the bulk of the financing himself, in the form of $21bn in equity and a $12.5bn loan against his shares in Tesla.
His willingness to spend a big chunk of his fortune on making Twitter more “inclusive” follows a period in which it has tightened its content moderation. A decade ago Twitter executives joked that the company was “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party”. But the presidency of Donald Trump and the covid-19 pandemic persuaded the company that free speech had some drawbacks.
The spectre of reinstating the tweeter-in-chief appals many on the left. So does Mr Musk’s impatience with what he describes as “woke” culture . A poll in America by YouGov this month found that whereas 54% of Republicans thought that Mr Musk buying Twitter would be good for society, only 7% of Democrats agreed.
If Twitter were to take a purist line on free speech, the immediate winners might therefore be its more censorious rivals, suggests Evelyn Douek, an expert on online speech at Harvard Law School. Until now, the main social networks have set roughly similar content-moderation policies, each reluctant to be an outlier. “You can imagine a Twitter with Trump back on its platform just being in the headlines all day, every day, while the other platforms sat back and ate their popcorn,” she says.
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