Twitter Under Musk: Friend of Free Speech or Agent of Chaos?

The billionaire Elon Musk has bought Twitter. As an outspoken freedom of speech proponent, Musk has frequently criticized Twitter’s moderation and the way he believes Twitter to limit freedom of speech at the expense of global society. The back story Musk became Twitter’s second-largest shareholder behind mutual fund giant The Vanguard Group this month after buying a 9.1% stake in the company—but this was just the beginning of his bid to buy the whole operation. He has partnered with Morgan Stanley, who holds the third-largest stake in Twitter with about 67 million shares, to raise $10 billion for the company. The Twitter board was initially against Elon Musk acquiring the company, rejecting his first offer, but after a busy weekend of negotiations and shareholder activity, it has finally reached terms to allow the sale to go through. On Monday, April 25, the board accepted his offer of $54.20 per share valuing the company at $44 billion. The motivation The question is—why does Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, want to buy Twitter? It's much smaller than many other social media platforms and has often been commercially challenged, but it has figured significantly in the news agenda and political discourse of recent years—look at how Donald Trump used and abused it—and has power and influence across global society. When asked at the recent TED conference in Vancouver why he wanted to buy Twitter, Musk answered “My strong, intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” In a letter to Twitter’s board, he said Twitter is “the platform for free speech around the world” but cannot achieve this “societal imperative” in its current form and “needs to be transformed as a private company.” So, free speech seems to be the driving motivation. Musk is famously a proponent of his view of free speech and has frequently tweeted about Twitter’s approach to moderation, labeling the platform overly censorious, particularly of conservative voices. People who have been banned from Twitter (Trump, Alex Jones) have not found a similar impact or audiences on other platforms. Twitter is where the influence is. We have to assume that Twitter is worth more than the price of its stock to Musk and that the platform is valuable to him in terms of defending free speech and giving him power in the conversations that matter in culture. Twitter has long battled with the challenge of balancing people’s freedom to say what they like with the harm that the platform can potentially do. Indeed, the regulatory environment for social media is becoming tougher: In the U.K., the forthcoming online safety bill requires platforms to monitor content to avoid pile-on and other unpleasant behavior. Elon Musk is highly likely to err on the side of letting people say what they like and oppose limitations to content, but even if Twitter is privately owned, it will not be immune to legislation. What changes are we likely to see? We have to assume that over time, the rules around moderation, which will be entirely at the discretion of Musk and those people he puts in charge, will change. If he decides to stop censoring some of the content that Twitter currently removes, sanctions or limits, then we could see the kind of hate speech and disinformation—QAnon, false election claims, vaccine hesitancy—that Twitter has tried to remove from the platform reappear. This would mean compromises to brand safety and a far more volatile marketplace for advertising on Twitter. Elon Musk has frequently been an agent of chaos in social media; his comments on Twitter have been provocative, and of course, his controversial tweeting around Dogecoin and the resultant impact on its price has caused some concern in the crypto community. Musk frequently blocks social media users who disagree with or criticize him and has used Twitter to bully journalists that have written less than flattering articles about him or his interests. With his 83 million followers, he already had a powerful voice on Twitter. If his own behavior is a model for what he deems acceptable on the platform, it might make Twitter a less appealing environment for advertisers, and if Musk doesn’t care about advertising revenues, this is an outcome that is unlikely to concern him. What happens now? We are unlikely to see immediate changes as there will be a regulatory process to complete, but we anticipate there being indications of the impact that the change in ownership will have on Twitter. As we await the changes, one thing is clear—the situation highlights the power that Twitter as a platform has and raises questions about how that power might be used in the future.

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Twitter Under Musk: Friend of Free Speech or Agent of Chaos?

The possible reemergence of hate speech and disinformation would make the platform a less appealing ad environment

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Jenny Kirby

Social Marketing

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