Elon Musk wants to allow anyone to say anything on Twitter if he succeeds in buying a social media platform.
What that paradise of free speech would be like — and who would want to live there — is another question.
"If his response is, 'If it is legitimate, it will always be so,' whatever he builds will be uncontrollable and will not be useful to most users," said Matthew Feeney, director of Project on Emerging Technologies in Cato. Institute, a think tank that fights for freedom.
Hours after Musk announced his promise to pay $ 54.20 a share in a deal that would include Twitter under his personal ownership, a Tesla chief executive said during an interview at a TED conference in Vancouver on Thursday that he intended to restore Twitter "as a free forum."
"Twitter has become a city square, so it is very important that both people have the truth and the idea that they can speak freely, within the confines of the law," he said.
His view would contradict the recent actions of Twitter and other popular social networking sites, including Meta Platforms' Facebook, so that police can raid their sites on charges of cyberbullying, unauthorized information, and other offensive language.
Twitter attaches warning labels to tweets that contain misleading information about the coronavirus vaccine and suspends content from official Russian government accounts in favor of timelines, notices or elsewhere on the site as the country leads the war in Ukraine.
After Donald Trump used Twitter to plant doubts about the legitimacy of his election defeat in the days surrounding January 6, 2021, a mob attack on a U.S. building. The Capitol, the former president, was permanently dismissed from the podium.
Musk, a full-time and sometimes controversial tweeter writer, seems to want to take the site to another laissez-faire case.
"My strong point is that having a more responsible and more inclusive public forum is crucial to the future of this civilization," Musk said at a TED conference.
For some — especially those on the left side of politics — that would be an unacceptable development.
"In the worst case scenario, that Elon Musk successfully transformed Twitter into a free-to-speak platform would be a major disaster for the information system," said Jesse Lehrich, founder of the Accountable Tech representative group. .
Reducing guidelines on what users can and cannot send will encourage lies, propaganda and hate speech to spread among hundreds of millions of Twitter users, many of whom rely on the platform as a major source of news and information, Lehrich said.
At the time, it was certain that Trump would be invited to return to the site if Musk became its owner, Lehrich said.
Trump, meanwhile, said in an interview with Americano Media broadcast Wednesday - after Musk revealed he had 9.2% stake in the company, but before saying he planned to acquire the company altogether - he said he "probably will not have. Interest" to return to the platform.
If Trump returns to Twitter, it will open the way for Facebook and Alphabet's YouTube to remove the former black president from the list of blacks he was arrested for in the days surrounding the January 2021 uprising, Lehrich said.
"I do not think it is easy to say that that would change the outcome of the 2024 election," he said. “This could be nothing at all. It can also have a big effect. ”
However, that level of influence will depend on whether Twitter is able to maintain — and grow — its existing user base under a new, free government, which some do not see as a guarantee.
"It's one thing to say that Donald Trump should be online. Far be it from video cuts and animals being crushed to death," said Cato's Feeney.
Phil Napoli, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, said there are already online corners that offer free speech, but it seems to draw a lot of users.
Parler's Court imposed a number of restrictions on its post, but failed to attract a large portion of the communications market, while Trump's proposed Truth Social Forum appeared to be struggling to get out, Napoli said.
"When these areas try to use this kind of freedom platform, it works faster and it is not clear whether that is the way to growth or sustainability," he said.
However, Napoli said, "Elon Musk may be in a situation where it is something he can support and lose if it is something he feels very much about."
Indeed, Musk, the richest man in the world, said at a TED conference that he was "not interested in the economy at all" about his Twitter application.
"This is not a way to make money," he said.
