He won. Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter was accepted by the company’s board early this morning and, pending shareholder approval, will result in one of the world’s most important social networks being taken private.
It may have been a joke — the $54.20 purchasing price being a nod towards a marijuana meme — but it’s also very real, which is Musk in a nutshell.
The purchase comes less than a month after the world’s richest man began courting the company. On April 4, Twitter announced that Musk had bought enough shares to become its largest shareholder. After being appointed and then unappointed to the company’s board over the span of a week, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO made an offer for the company well above the trading price. Despite chatter of a poison pill provision meant to thwart the purchase, the Twitter board accepted the generous offer after two weeks. Money talks, and Musk has a lot of it.
Musk’s victory lap, posted to Twitter naturally, also laid out a few priorities for his administration. He reiterated previous statements calling Twitter a “digital town square” and highlighted free speech as a guiding principle. He also mentioned a handful of other ideas that have varying levels of viability: open sourcing algorithms, getting rid of spam, and allowing every person to be authenticated on the platform.
That’s what Musk has said. Now let’s look at what Musk has done. He is a profligate tweeter. Over the past few years, Musk has transformed himself in the public eye from being “rich entrepreneur” to “billionaire memelord” by tweeting about Dogecoin, anime and Minecraft. This erratic shitposting has been key to building his enormous fanatical following that helps him dominate the world’s attention. Now his tweets literally move markets. Musk can sell out products or introduce ideas into the public consciousness in 280 characters or less.
Twitter has become key to Musk’s enormous cultural and social power. That also makes it his weakness. The billionaire has frequently skated close to the line, using Twitter to call a UK diver who helped in the Thai cave rescue a “pedo guy” and to promote COVID-19 misinformation. His fast and loose style of tweeting puts him at risk of one day going too far and coming a cropper of the platform’s policies, which could end in a suspension or ban. Ultimately, his existence on the platform — and all the power that he wields because of it — relies on the good will of the company’s content moderators.
It’s no surprise, then, that Musk’s biggest gripe with the platform has been its content moderation and how it could curtail speech. His appeal to free speech maximalism should be viewed through the lens of how evolving, increasingly nuanced ideas of how to moderate platforms could be a threat to his existence online. Certainly neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, QAnon influencers and generally the internet’s worst people celebrated his takeover as a win for unfettered free speech and all the horrors that can portend. (It’s worth noting that the presence of abuse and hate on a platform also threatens free speech, but that rarely comes up from Musk and his ideological ilk.)
What Musk is promising feels reminiscent of a campaign from a fellow billionaire who also used the platform to drive news cycles, whip up a frenzy from his dedicated fans and dominate Twitter’s trending section with a single tweet: Donald Trump. When the former US president was banned, Musk’s Twitter filled the vacuum at the centre of the platform. It’s fitting, then, that his vision for Twitter is the MAGAfication of the web 2.0 platform.
Trump’s 2016 campaign promised a return to a time when you could say anything without consequences, a pitch that combined a dogwhistle with an idealistic vision of the past that existed only for a few, if it ever existed at all. Musk essentially wants to take Twitter and its content moderation policies back to its earlier libertarian roots, harking back to when the company called itself the “free speech wing of the free speech party”.
But Twitter’s past wasn’t a better time for most. Midway through the 2010s, Twitter was notorious for being a platform filled with abuse and hate speech. People, particularly women and people of colour, were frequently trolled off the site while the alt-right ran wild. The general consensus is that it’s improved as the site’s content moderation has been ratcheted up. Returning to the laissez faire content moderation policies and approach of Twitter’s yesteryear would be a regression.
It’s easy to overreact to a big news event, and the world’s richest man buying what is arguably the most important information platform feels big (and kind of dystopian if I’m being honest). As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel writes, there is a range of outcomes, but the most likely one is less immediately catastrophic than some may think.
It’s unlikely the platform will change much at first. Much like Tesla features announced via Twitter, it’s likely Musk will push for new features like the long-sought-after edit button. His fascination on content moderation might end up being dampened by the reality of what it means to run a company that makes tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of content moderation decisions every day. Realistically Musk’s role in SpaceX and Tesla will split his attention.
If Musk persists with an organisational decree to scale back content moderation, the shift will happen gradually. Expect to see the temperature rise as people see that they can get away with more without repercussions. You think the vibe is bad on Twitter now? Just wait until the most extreme users of the platform realise they can push it just a little bit further.
That’s fine for Musk. As the king of the pack, as someone who directs the pile-ons rather than receives them, that’s the way things should be. He doesn’t care what’s happening downstream just as long as everyone is paying attention to him.
