LAST month, as he started to float the idea of buying Twitter, Elon Musk said something very revealing. Since Twitter effectively serves as the “public town square”, he said, “failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy”. He was completely right. We may not like the fact, but the platform that Musk just […]
LAST month, as he started to float the idea of buying Twitter, Elon Musk said something very revealing.
Since Twitter effectively serves as the “public town square”, he said, “failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy”.
He was completely right. We may not like the fact, but the platform that Musk just bought for $44billion (£35billion) has become the global town square. Issues of politics and culture are fought over bitterly there. Reputations are made and destroyed.
The people who founded Twitter may not have expected this to be the case, but in the past ten years it became that.
Donald Trump elbowed his way to the Presidency in part because with Twitter he had the means to speak directly to the public. But Twitter started to worry about this. So while everyone was milling about, it started to police the town square. At first without telling anybody.
It started “shadow-banning” people, that is effectively muting users’ accounts so they were speaking into a void, while thinking they had a voice. Twitter denied this, then denied it again, then accepted it and made it one of its terms of service. More sinister was when people started to disappear from the platform.
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This started with a few ugly flame-thrower types on the far-right, who nobody much missed. But then Twitter’s definition of “extreme” seemed to come closer and closer to the political centre.
It started banning perfectly reasonable voices on the right. By this year it started to suspend accounts, or cancel them altogether, if users did not refer to an American swimmer who dates girls and still has his meat and two veg as a “she”. Not only was the town square suddenly very heavily policed, it was policed with the most bonkers rules imaginable. With no right to appeal for anyone who had been removed.
Even the President of the United States, the man who had helped make Twitter what it was, eventually had his account removed. Donald J Trump has been strangely silenced ever since. Quite a thing for a tech platform to be able to do to an ex-President.
No wonder Piers Morgan’s interview with him for TalkTV made such a stir. But it was the hypocrisy of this that rankled most. While Trump and various other right-wingers were chucked off Twitter, look at the people who were allowed to stay on it.
Many Islamic terrorist groups still have accounts. A couple of years back I brought to the company’s attention that it still gave a platform to the group that had carried out the Mumbai massacre. It took years for the firm to take it down.
Yet look at who is still on there. A former US President may not be allowed, but the Supreme Leader of Iran has a Twitter account. As does the former President of Iran, who called for the annihilation of Israel. Why should the Ayatollahs have a platform but an account such as the hilarious satirical site Babylon Bee is banned?
It’s the same with the Kremlin. The Russians are still allowed to push out state propaganda across Twitter.
Only in the past month has the company even vaguely woken up to this fact and added some “warnings” to certain Kremlin accounts.
The most charitable thing you can say about Twitter is that it never meant to be here. It got too much power too fast and didn’t know how to cope.
The less charitable view (which is mine, as it happens) is that it is not fit for purpose.
And in part, that is because Twitter is policed by woke twentysomethings who have more power than they should have and less brains than they imagine.
So Musk taking over the company is an extremely good thing. Musk is eccentric. He is also brilliant.
Crucially, he has shown, again since he bought the company, that he understands the importance of free speech and understands the need for the public square to be open.
Immediately after buying the platform he said he hoped his critics would stay on it, because that is what free speech is about.
Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.
Elon Musk
And he added: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”
He is absolutely right. But of course, this caused a meltdown among some.
The radical Left are currently performing hysterical attacks on Musk before he has even done anything.
They are pretending Twitter is now going to become an “unsafe space” for minorities.
Though ask any of the women such as JK Rowling who are active on Twitter whether the platform felt like a wholly “safe space” for them up until now.
Twitter is not just the public square. It is also the Wild West. A noisy, argumentative, sometimes brawling place.
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There are things that can be done to improve that. But essentially, if you don’t like the town then don’t enter the saloon. It’s as simple as that.
