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The Tesla chief has acquired Twitter for $46bn and plans to re-evaluate the platform’s stance on free speech and cancel culture. The EU commission now warns that any plans to loosen moderation policies must be handled carefully and that Musk won’t be given free rein.
The drawn out Twitter saga has finally reached its end. Sort of.
Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk has officially secured ownership of the platform, fronting $21bn himself, pledging $12bn through a Tesla loan, and utilising partner banks for a further 13bn in debt financing – the overall purchase came out at a cool $46bn.
Insert lame joke about how we all downloaded it for free. How original, how clever!
Exactly what the world’s second richest man plans to do with his new purchase, nobody quite knows. We’ve had some general tweets mentioning defeating spam bots, introducing human authentication, potentially an edit button, and open source algorithms, but Musk has yet to announce anything concrete.
What we have heard is that the crux of his pitch deck, being a self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist,’ reportedly involved loosening the current moderation policies at play on the bird app.
Elon has bought twitter. Twitter is actually saved
— ksi (@KSI) April 25, 2022
Clearly buoyed by his purchase, the new Twitter chief put out a slew of rousing (or self-righteous) – depending on your inclination – tweets on Monday. Within them, he described free speech as ‘the bedrock of a functioning democracy,’ before later expressing his desire to turn Twitter into a ‘digital town hall where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.’
Would certainly make for an interesting lunch time scroll, right? We’ll have some of that.
In the wider landscape of Big Tech, however, there are potential hiccups when considering how Musk’s ideas will stack up with stricter standards of digital policing just brought into effect by EU legislators?
