After buying nine percent of outstanding Twitter shares recently, Elon Musk has announced his intention to buy Twitter and take it private. The financial details are still in flux, but two numbers tell the story: Musk is the world's richest man (estimated net worth north of $200 billion) and the largest money numbers Wikipedia associates with Twitter (assets and equity) are less than one-tenth of that. So no matter what the SEC, shareholders, and even Twitter's board says or does, it's very likely that if Musk wants to buy Twitter, he'll be able to do it.
Then what?
On the face of it, why a serial entrepreneur and latter-day Tom Swift like Musk would want to buy a not-very-profitable social media company is not clear. On Wikipedia's list of the ten most-followed tweeters (I don't use it myself, so excuse the linguistic infelicities if I don't use quite the right words in discussing Twitter), Musk is No. 8, just ahead of Narendra Modi (India's prime minister) and just behind Lady Gaga. No. 1 is Barack Obama, who more than two years after stepping down from the presidency still has a twitter-hold on 136 million followers. No. 2 is Justin Bieber, who Wikipedia dryly lists as "musician." Musk is the only businessman in the top ten, but he's not just a businessman. He's also an instinctive showman who has somehow managed to retain a teenage boy's "hold my beer and watch this" attitude while transforming whole industries—aerospace and automobiles, in particular.
It's not in Musk's nature to lay out his plans in any coherent news-release way. But my sense is that he thinks Twitter does too much censorship and suspension of accounts, and maybe also doesn't exploit their position as the globe's largest short-message service of its kind as effectively as they could. Surprisingly for a company with over 200 million active users (and many more who receive tweets), they lost money in 2021. So Musk's interest in the firm may be purely financial, and he may think he can just run it better. If he buys it, he will have the opportunity to find out.
Twitter is a novel phenomenon in the history of communications. Sociologists, political scientists, and historians are still sorting out its manifold effects on society, and many of the intellectual class worry that Musk's takeover bid will make things worse. They fear that Musk, who has shown libertarian tendencies in the past, will reduce Twitter's efforts to monitor and control its content, as it famously did when it permanently blocked President Trump on January 8, 2021, thus ending what was perhaps the most-watched Twitter account ever.
What is the worst-case scenario for a Musk takeover of Twitter, at least short of him shutting the whole thing down and dissolving the company (which Twitter has done to smaller rivals in the past)? The greatest fear seems to be that Twitter will turn into some sort of common-carrier technology that literally anyone can use for anything—pornography, incitement to riot, murder threats, you name it.
Twitter already allows pornographic messages but insists on labeling them as such. So that wouldn't be much of a change. I can imagine some changes in Twitter's policies that would make the free-for-all prospect less threatening. I don't know what legal boilerplate one has to agree to in order to use Twitter (and probably nobody but a few lawyers understands it all anyway), but if there was some clause to the effect that Twitter will fully cooperate with any law-enforcement officials in the investigation of illegal doings using Twitter, that would allow the organization to point its fingers at wrongdoers, or at least their accounts. Tracking down bad guys on the Internet is always hard, but to pretend that Twitter is the main security threat to Internet users is to ignore all the other cybercrime that goes on without it.
My point is that right now, Twitter seems to be pretty free, and if Musk made it totally free it would be a rather small and incremental change. And on the plus side, allowing completely free speech on Twitter would comport better with the First Amendment rights guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution, although technically, as a private company Twitter can (and still could) censor anything and everything it wants to.
Money is power, and we see here a fabulously rich and therefore powerful man attempting to control another center of power, or at least conduit of power, which Twitter as a prominent social-media outlet represents. But what little I know about Musk tells me that his intentions, while they may have a touch of silliness now and then, are basically benign.
There is a growing trend on the part of some to view certain ideas and discourse as so threatening that it should be suppressed, whether by Twitter censors or some other means. Those of us raised long enough ago that freedom of speech was presented to us as grade-schoolers in a positive and un-ironic way tend to believe that such freedom is one of the bedrock foundations of U. S. democracy. And if we start going down the path of censorship—whether it's called that or "stopping disinformation" or "countering fake news"—the consequence will be less freedom and a move toward tyranny.
The technology of the Internet and social media have given rise to something that we as societies are still trying to figure out: a way of reaching millions or billions of people that is potentially uncontrolled by any central authority. This is a truly new thing in the world. Some regimes have decided that Twitter is so bad in its current form that they won't allow it at all. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are on that list, and Nigeria banned it for a year after it deleted tweets from the Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari.
That list suggests to me that whatever Twitter is doing, the good may well outweigh the bad. In trying to buy Twitter, I think Musk is only trying to make it better. And I for one am willing to see what he means by better.
Sources: NPR carried a report on Musk's plans to buy Twitter at https://www.npr.org/2022/04/21/1094020022/elon-musk-twitter-money. I also referred to a brief piece on the New Yorker website at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-would-elon-musk-want-to-buy-twitter and the Wikipedia article on Twitter. For those who do not recognize the reference to Tom Swift, he was a fictional young inventor featured in dozens of novels published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate in the early 1900s aimed primarily at teenage boys.
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