What Happens if Elon Musk Buys Twitter. By Darren Beattie.
Twitter remains, by Elon’s own admission, the de facto public town square. Despite its severe censorship, it is still the only major digital public space where anonymous accounts can interact with celebrities, journalists and business titans (including Elon), where world leaders engage in spirited public diplomacy, and where dominant cultural and political narratives incubate and spread.
The most exciting possibility is therefore the most obvious one: Musk should simply buy a controlling stake in Twitter itself.
He could certainly afford it. At $31 billion, Twitter’s market cap is less than 15 percent of Musk’s current net worth. Even if one regards Twitter stock as entirely worthless, Musk could theoretically buy a controlling stake in it and still be the world’s richest man by fifty billion dollars, and free speech would be restored to the “land of the free.”
Nope. The system doesn’t work properly anymore, and the ruling class would hammer him and Twitter because they hate free speech.
But in practice, it’s not that easy. In fact, one would be hard pressed to imagine a project more dangerous and difficult than restoring free speech to a major tech platform like Twitter. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a more worthwhile project.
Restoring genuine free speech would do more for patriotic Americans than the GOP taking back the White House in 2024, and it would pose a greater threat to the ruling Regime than anything Russia, China, or Iran might plausibly do.
Free speech online is what enabled the Trump revolution in 2016. If the Internet had been as free in 2020 as it was four years before, Trump would have cruised to reelection. Massive censorship and suppression are the tools needed to prop up Covid tyranny, the Ukraine war fever, and the idea that Lia Thomas is a “woman.”
America’s decrepit and illegitimate ruling class intuitively understand this: Absolute freedom of speech, or even the speech norms that prevailed a mere decade ago, would instantly cause the American regime as we know it to crumble.
Musk could sack the censor-loving Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal
In short, transforming Twitter back into a real free speech platform would represent nothing less than a declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire. …
People own media for political power, not direct profits:
Tucker Carlson Tonight is the most popular program in cable news, yet no other networks try to imitate its content. The reason, we argued, is that ratings (and by extension profitability) are not even the real point of major news outlets:
For a media empire operating at the highest levels, the influence it wields on the public’s mind is far more valuable to the ruling power structure than any self-contained profit that could be generated by optimizing their news product to suit the taste of the audience. …
The Tucker Carlson Paradox applies in its most extreme form to a platform like Twitter. Twitter’s market capitalization of barely $30 billion is extremely modest by Big Tech standards. Even Snapchat is twice as valuable. And yet, as the global public square, Twitter is also the epicenter of narrative formation, a key promotional vehicle for journalists and celebrities, and an increasingly critical stage for public diplomacy and hybrid warfare between state powers. Twitter gets to decide which “freedom fighters” deserve to have their slogans go viral and which “authoritarians” and “domestic terrorists” need to be suppressed and censored. …
What would happen if Elon Musk bought Twitter:
If Musk opts for the path of boldness and glory, he should be prepared for historic backlash from the regime. The entire system would mobilize against Twitter …
The moment Twitter stopped telling users what they are supposed to think, elites would immediately treat Twitter as responsible for what all its users think and do. Twitter would be blamed for every so-called act of “racism” “sexism” and “transphobia” occurring on its platform. All of this would be presented not merely as a moral failure, but as an explicit danger. …
If a Twitter user were involved in a shooting, or some sort of terrorist plot, the American national security apparatus would immediately mobilize against it as a “hotbed” of “terrorist extremism.” …
Look what happened to Parler:
As Twitter censorship ramped up during the 2020 “racial reckoning,” Parler added millions of users. In the days after the November election, it was the most-downloaded app in the United States. By January 2021, it was up to 15 million regular users. It was becoming a real, viable alternative to Twitter. So the press and Big Tech retaliated. Articles equating Parler with “hate speech” proliferated.
When the events of January 6 happened, the ground had already been prepared to nuke Parler, and the decisive attack was instantaneous. Protesters first breached the Capitol building around 2:00 p.m., and by 4:41 the New York Times had already blamed Parler for it. Within three days, the narrative had hardened: Parler was responsible for any criminal activity by its users, and deserved collective punishment for it. …
The name-calling would be intense:
Once Musk’s new free-speech Twitter is established as a bad actor, a vast constellation of activists and non-profits will lurch into action to put more and more pressure on the company to change its ways.
These sorts of attacks should be familiar, as they were used to bring Twitter in line with the censorship regime years ago. In 2011, Twitter was branding itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” Five years later, recurring purges had begun. What happened? Among other things, powerful left-wing activist groups besieged the company for years.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was one such ideological pressure group. It put out reports faulting Twitter for the existence of anti-Semitism and other -isms on its platform, then used friendly media reporters to amplify them and, essentially, state its demands. … By calling Twitter’s “mainstreaming” of anti-Semitism the worst seen in the ADL’s history, he was accusing Twitter of enabling a flare-up worse than the prelude to the Holocaust. The message: Play ball, or be ready to be put in league with Nazis. …
A true free speech platform wouldn’t just be smeared as “racist,” but also as a “national security threat” by virtue of giving a forum to designated foreign and domestic enemies of the regime. A U.S. senator already accused Tulsi Gabbard of treason for “parroting” Russian “propaganda.” It isn’t remotely beyond the pale to imagine such charges being thrown at the leader of a free-speech Twitter as well.
Facebook was forced to censor:
Even corporate America can get in on the game. In summer 2020 Facebook experienced a massive ad boycott because its already-restrictive censorship practices were not strict enough. Participants included Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Target, Verizon, and hundreds of others. And it worked: By August Facebook was banning all pages allegedly tied to QAnon, by October it had banned Holocaust denial, and in January it was ready to join in the systematic destruction of President Trump’s presence online. …
It would become anti-regime and job-loss time to have a Twitter account:
Over time, more and more pressure will be brought to bear. It will become an “activist” behavior to performatively delete one’s account (perhaps after writing a tweet-threat denunciation). As such campaigns go, it will start with a few professional agitators, then ideologically-aligned journalists and celebrities, then lawmakers, and finally major corporations and anybody just looking to avoid trouble.
Eventually, maintaining a Twitter account will become like publicly supporting Donald Trump, defending J.K. Rowling, or donating to Kyle Rittenhouse: Legal, but not the sort of thing done by a person who cares about their career. …
Twitter is the regime’s talking shop:
Think Twitter is too big to ever take down? Think again. If America’s ruling class acting in concert can silence a sitting United States president they are capable of cutting off virtually anything. …
If Facebook blocked Twitter links and Google deranked its search results, the company would suffer huge hits to its traffic and bottom line. Media outlets could stop embedding or even linking Twitter threads as a protest against the platform’s “hate” or “extremism.”
Of course, the regime and its leftist acolytes would just create a new Twitter and move to it.
Some say Elon Musk is the world’s richest person, some say it’s Vladimir Putin.
