Will Elon Musk (and his kitchen sink) stop Twitter being an echo chamber for Left-wingers?
As he claims ‘the bird is freed’ after £38billion takeover...
Elon Musk could scarcely have made his intentions clearer this week when news broke that, following a protracted legal wrangle, he had bought the social media giant Twitter.
‘The bird is freed,’ wrote the world’s richest man on Twitter, of course, for the benefit of his 110 million followers.
This was not only a reference to the site’s famous logo of a blue bird but, many assumed, also a nod to his plans for the platform to censor far fewer conservatives — and display far less left-wing political bias — than it has in recent years.
The Tesla tycoon has made it clear the $44billion (£38billion) purchase is about so much more than adding another asset to his bulging portfolio. Back in April, he said the takeover was not ‘to make more money’ (social media experts wonder if the consistently unprofitable website will ever achieve that).
Instead, Musk’s true intentions are perhaps revealed by his tweet earlier this year when he first announced his planned takeover: ‘The Barbarians are at the Gate.’ As far as the inherently left-wing Silicon Valley is concerned, the metaphor is apt.
Musk, a libertarian who insists free speech is all-but absolute, seems determined to put a rocket up the technology industry’s cosy progressive consensus. Earlier this week, he arrived at Twitter’s glitzy San Francisco headquarters carrying a bathroom sink.
‘Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!’ he tweeted.
But few left-wingers now see the funny side. Some have hysterically dismissed the takeover as ‘dangerous’ and ‘a threat to democracy’.
Swiftly escorted out of the company’s glitzy San Francisco headquarters this week was its long-serving head lawyer and the woman dubbed its ‘chief censor’, Vijaya Gadde. The significance of her departure didn’t go unnoticed: she led the team that decided to kick Donald Trump off the platform in January last year following the invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
Celebrities including actress Mia Farrow and ex-BBC Radio 1 DJ Jameela Jamil have threatened to quit the platform altogether in protest at Musk’s takeover. Jamil left in April only to rejoin in July after it was reported Musk was pulling out of the deal. Farrow is also still on Twitter.
TV pRESEnTER Richard osman tweeted with heavy irony, apparently mocking Musk’s many fans: ‘Elon is good. Elon is protect us and kind man. Everything is happpy today. From Richad[sic] Twitter.’
Meanwhile, the EU commissioner in charge of overseeing the bloc’s digital market, Thierry Breton, insists: ‘In Europe, the bird will fly by our EU rules’ — suggesting regulators will take a dim view if Musk seeks to relax Twitter’s policies.
But Musk, a former Democrat who says he became a Republican in disgust at the left’s growing radicalism, realises that Twitter is at the front line of the raging battle for the right to free speech online — and wants to play a central role in it.
Twitter has long been accused of flagrant partisanship: Musk himself has said it ‘obviously has a strong left-wing bias’.
While it infamously banned Trump, it also suppressed details of the story surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop: the scandal over leaked data from a computer that had belonged to the son of president Joe Biden.
This may have had a seismic impact on American democracy by helping to sway the last presidential election.
The material, including videos, revealed Hunter apparently smoking drugs and cavorting with prostitutes and — most seriously — allegedly discussing his controversial business deals with his father. While Facebook decided to ‘limit distribution’ of this embarrassing tale, Twitter led the attempt to kill it altogether. It targeted the new York post, the newspaper that had first revealed details of Hunter’s misdeeds in the final weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
on the grounds that the story broke its rules on distributing hacked material, Twitter shut the post’s account for 16 days and blocked its users from sharing any information about the laptop.
Anyone who attempted to post details of the story saw their accounts locked. The website only belatedly relented when the story was shown to be legitimate. (Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and exchief executive, conceded this farrago had been a ‘total mistake’.)
Republicans attacked it as a shameless attempt to influence the election — and a subsequent poll by America’s Media Research Centre suggested the story’s suppression may indeed have helped to ensure Joe Biden made it to the White House.
But this was just one sorry example of Twitter’s extraordinary bias — and exactly the kind of thing Musk is expected to put a stop to. Time and again, despite claiming to be an impartial champion of free speech, Twitter has censored conservatives — and only conservatives.
From Trump to a satirical rightwing website called the Babylon Bee, which tastelessly named a male-to-female transgender U.S. navy admiral its ‘Man of the Year’, Twitter has come down hard on those who dared to sin against its
woke, left-wing world view. Meanwhile, it has retained a platform for terrorists and Muslim extremists to express their views.
But now that ignoble reputation may finally start to improve.
Musk has already extended an invitation to Trump to return to Twitter, having described the decision to ban him as ‘morally bad’ and ‘foolish in the extreme’.
Yesterday, Trump said the site was ‘now in sane hands’, adding that he was ‘very happy’ it will ‘no longer be run by Radical left
lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country’.
The ex-president previously insisted he won’t rejoin Twitter but many doubt such an arch self-publicist will be able to resist the lure of potentially regaining the 88million followers he enjoyed there.
Musk does concede some limits on speech will remain. He reassured advertisers: ‘Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.’
Many people avoid the rancorous site and perhaps feel saner for it, but it remains a valuable platform for debate and immensely influential: a preferred medium for public figures from world leaders to leading commentators and pop stars and a place where ordinary people can exchange views, cheer or berate one another.
Musk aptly calls his new toy a ‘digital town square’, where — he hopes — a ‘wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence’. But this ‘range’ has previously been limited.
Under its ‘hateful conduct’ policy, for example, Twitter bans even accidental ‘misgendering’ or ‘dead-naming’ transgender people (identifying them by their gender at birth or their birth names). At the height of the Black lives Matter protests in 2020, the ‘bio’ on its corporate Twitter account read simply: ‘#BlacklivesMatter @BlackTranslivesMatter.’
The political donations made by Twitter staff have reportedly been 98.7 per cent to the Democrats.
Is it any wonder then, sceptics ask, that those who fall victim to its censorship are all on the political Right? And is it any wonder that a man like Elon Musk wants to take a barbarian-sized battleaxe to the company?
AlREADY, Musk has conducted some fairly ruthless personnel changes, sacking bosses including the aforementioned Gadde as well as chief executive parag Agrawal, who is set to receive a reported $38 million (£36 million) payoff.
Agrawal’s unashamedly woke politics have long alarmed critics, appalled that he should be in charge of so influential a site, which claims to have more than 230 million users. In 2010, he tweeted: ‘If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.’
Ten years later, just before he took over the company, he pointedly insisted that Twitter’s ‘role was not to be bound by the First Amendment’ — the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of free speech. Instead, it should ‘focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed’. For some conservatives, the implied threat was obvious.
However, the fact that so many left-wingers and Silicon Valley insiders have expressed horror at Musk gaining control of Twitter speaks volumes.
But some will argue instead that the left is merely anticipating a taste of its own censorship medicine — and not before time.