The price of free speech: why Elon Musk’s $44bn vision for Twitter could fall apart
Contained within 95 pages of dense legal jargon, the warning from Twitter to Elon Musk was clear: don’t use your considerable power on the social media platform to attack the company.
The world’s richest man and owner-in-waiting of Twitter signed an agreement for the planned $44bn (£35bn) takeover last week confirming that he could tweet about the deal so long as “such tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives”.
Yet hours later the self-described “free speech absolutist” was engaging with tweets criticising senior Twitter staff, including an interaction with a political podcast host who had labelled the company’s legal head, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s “top censorship advocate”.
The inevitable consequence for Gadde was one of the grimmer phenomena of social media: a pile-on. Comments included calls for her to lose her job and, in a typical example of unpleasant digital hyperbole, statements that Gadde would “go down in history as an appalling person”.
Announcing the deal to buy Twitter last week, Musk said: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” Musk has a history of contentious tweets but his Gadde post fuelled concerns in some quarters about the Tesla chief executive’s idea of free speech. Will it come at the cost of protecting Twitter users from abuse, cyberbullying and extremist content?
“I think that Musk’s conception of free expression is both contradictory and foolish,” says Jillian York, a free speech activist and the author of Silicon Values: the Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism. “Absolutism on a platform like Twitter fails to take into account the very real harms
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