Opinion | Liberals Currently Control Twitter. That Needs to Change.

Elon Musk is about to pollute the country’s discourse, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him.

This is the alarm going up about the eccentric billionaire’s on-again, off-again, on-again-if-it-looks-like-a-Delaware-court-is-going-to-insist-on-it acquisition of Twitter.

The panic about Musk’s purchase bears a resemblance to the hysteria about the Trump administration’s repeal of net neutrality, which was supposed to bring all sorts of dire consequences that never materialized.

Most of the complaints about Musk are meritless and tell us more about the cluelessness or hypocrisy of his critics than his alleged perfidy. At the end of the day, the case against him boils down to the criticism that he will allow too much unfettered speech on his social media platform, a plaint that would have made little sense to anyone a decade or so ago when the balance of center-left opinion was still robustly free speech.

As it is, a libertarian-ish business leader is saying he wants an important platform for political and social advocacy and argument to provide the widest possible latitude for varied, clashing views, and the reaction of a large segment of commentators is, “This man must be stopped.”

Musk can’t catch a break. Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted, “When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy.”

As they say on Twitter, “Who’s going to tell him?”

Successful social media companies aren’t typically owned and run by low-income individuals (at least not by the time they are out of their garages). The co-founder and former CEO of Twitter who was in place when Reich was much less alarmed by the direction of the platform, Jack Dorsey, is worth $7 billion by some estimates.

Although he’s taken a beating lately, Mark Zuckerberg still has a net worth of something like $50 billion.

Suffice it to say that Musk is not single-handedly bringing income inequality to America’s social-media companies.

At the end of the day, the biggest problem that Musk’s critics have with him is that he is a threat to their de facto control of Twitter. Ben Collins of NBC tweeted that Twitter will change dramatically if Musk owns it, and if the takeover “gets done early enough, based on the people he’s aligned with, yes, it would actually affect [the] midterms.”

The worry that Twitter’s policies under Musk might affect the upcoming election is an implicit acknowledgment that its current policies have political consequences, and they clearly do — otherwise, it wouldn’t be that so many Democrats and progressives happen to be absolutely desperate to protect the Twitter status quo.

Collins warned that if Musk takes Twitter private the rule-making could become “capricious.” Indeed, Musk “can elevate any idea or person he wants through recommendations and UX [user experience] choices and there will be no oversight on this as a private company.”

One wonders what has supposedly happened prior to this point? Was there accountability when Twitter tried to squelch a totally legitimate news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election? Has anyone blown the whistle as the platform forbids one side of the debate on trans issues from using its preferred terms and expressing its deeply held, sincere beliefs? Is anyone keeping it from suspending the account of a conservative satirical publication, or cracking down on an account devoted simply to reposting already public videos?

The worst case is that these decisions are made explicitly to disadvantage conservatives. The best case is that decisions about what constitutes harassment and misinformation and the like inevitably involve subjective value judgments and politics naturally enters into them.

It would be easier to believe that neutral criteria were used, say, to kick Marjorie Taylor Greene off the platform, if a member of the Squad were getting dinged, too. It’d be easier to take the flagging of conservatives for spreading misinformation or alleged misinformation, if, for instance, Stacey Abrams and her supporters were whistled for running down the Georgia election system with various provable distortions.

Twitter is run as if a workforce of hyper-online progressive employees overwhelmingly living and working in a deeply blue jurisdiction is calling the shots, and, of course, so it is.

Another count against Musk is that these employees hate him. But so what? If we all agree that Twitter is an important public forum, its rules shouldn’t be set by a group of people who have a vested interest in vindicating their own ideological beliefs and fashionable obsessions.

The underlying belief of those who think Musk is about to ruin Twitter and blight the American political conversation is that Donald Trump wouldn’t have won the 2016 presidential election if it weren’t for Russian bots and right-wing purveyors of misinformation running riot on social media. If these were all repressed, the electoral system would be restored to its senses — meaning back to Democratic control.

The effect of the 2016 Russian information operation was always exaggerated, though, and the attempt to squash misinformation on social media has veered into misbegotten campaigns against entirely reasonable points of view that baffle or outrage progressive America (the idea that Covid might have leaked from a lab got this treatment for a while).

Musk’s classical-liberal view that false or unwelcome speech is best combated by more speech once was a matter of consensus. That it feels radical now and is so bitterly contested is a symptom of how the Overton window has shifted toward speech suppression in the name of content moderation.

By the way, allowing Trump back on Twitter, as Musk is expected to do, wouldn’t be a partisan power play. First of all, its significance would probably be exaggerated. Trump getting kicked off Twitter diminished his influence over the hour-by-hour political and media conversation, but it’s not as though he’s been bereft without it — he’s retained his hold on the GOP, the real measure of his power, just fine.

Also, his Twitter return would hardly be an unalloyed benefit to him or the GOP. There are a lot of people in the Republican Party who would prefer to look past his poisonous musings and it’s a little harder to do that if he’s back Twitter. (His own platform, Truth Social, doesn’t have nearly the sway.) And Democrats, who want Trump to be as prominent as possible as a foil for Biden and others, should welcome a steady diet of Trump tweets again.

There is no doubt that Musk will encounter significant challenges to implementing his vision. Lines have to be drawn somewhere and he’ll have to guard against being as arbitrary as the prior regime just in a different way. But no one should doubt that he is deeply anti-bot (he’s complained bitterly about their prevalence and tried to use them as a way out of the deal), and hopefully he will find more ways to allow people to choose for themselves what they want to see or not, without Sanhedrin-like rulings on deeply contentious political and moral questions.

Obviously, not all of this will be to everyone’s liking, especially to progressives who have gotten used to working their will with Twitter. But the social media platform is, ultimately, a private business that can set any rules it wants. If a more free-speech-oriented Twitter is hateful to them, they can take the advice they threw at conservatives disenchanted with the platform in recent years and go out and, “build their own Twitter.”