Would Musk Allow Trump Back on Twitter? The Changes Ahead if He Wins Control.

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What that free-speech paradise would look likeand who would want to hang out thereis another question.

If his answer is going to be, If its legal, it stays up, whatever hes building will be unmanageable and wont be useful to most users, said Matthew Feeney, director of the Project on Emerging Technologies at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank .

Hours after Musk disclosed his offer to pay $ 54.20 a share in a deal that would put Twitter under his private ownership, the Tesla CEO said during an interview at a TED conference in Vancouver Thursday that he aimed to recast Twitter as an inclusive arena for free speech .

Twitter has become kind of a de facto town square, so its really important that people both have the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely, within the bounds of the law, he said.

His vision would run counter to recent moves by Twitter and other mainstream social media sites, including Meta Platforms Facebook, to more aggressively police their properties for cases of online harassment, disinformation, and other speech deemed detrimental to public discourse.

Twitter attaches warning labels to tweets that contain misleading information about the coronavirus vaccine and has stopped content from official Russian government accounts from being recommended in timelines, notifications or elsewhere on the site as that country wages war in Ukraine.

After Donald Trump used Twitter to sow doubt about the legitimacy of his electoral defeat in the days surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the US Capitol building, the former president was permanently booted from the platform.

Musk, a prolific and sometimes controversial tweeter himself, appears to want to take the site in a more laissez-faire direction.

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, Musk said at the TED conference.

To someespecially those on the political leftthat would be an unwelcome development.

In the worst-case scenario, having Elon Musk successfully turn Twitter into the free-speech absolutist site he wants it to be could be pretty catastrophic for the information ecosystem, said Jesse Lehrich, a co-founder of the advocacy group Accountable Tech.

Lowering the guardrails on what users can and cant post would encourage falsehoods, propaganda and hate speech to proliferate among Twitters hundreds of millions of users, many of whom depend on the platform as a primary source of news and information, Lehrich said.

Meanwhile, it was virtually certain that Trump would be invited back onto the site if Musk became its owner, Lehrich said.

Trump, for his part, said in an interview with Americano Media that aired Wednesdayafter Musk had disclosed a 9.2% stake in the company, but before he said he planned to acquire the company outrightthat he probably wouldn’t have any interest in rejoining the platform.

If Trump did return to Twitter, it would clear the way for Facebook and Alphabets YouTube to remove the former president from the blacklists they also placed him on in the days surrounding the January 2021 insurrection, Lehrich said.

I dont think its a stretch to say that could well change the outcome of the 2024 election, he said. This could be nothing at all. It could also be hugely consequential.

Still, that degree of influence would depend on Twitter being able to retainand growits existing user base under a new, more libertarian regime, which some dont see as a certainty.

Its one thing to say Donald Trump should be online. Thats a long way from beheading videos and animals being crushed to death, said Catos Feeney. Its a little too flippant and unrealistic to say, Anything goes.

Phil Napoli, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, said there are already corners of the internet that offer venues for unfettered expression, but they dont seem to be drawing a critical mass of users.

The Parler platform places few restrictions on its posts, but it has failed to claim much of the social-media market, while Trumps own proposed Truth Social platform appears to be struggling to get off the ground, Napoli said.

When these places try to put this sort of libertarian platform model into effect, it devolves pretty quickly and its not entirely clear thats a recipe for growth or sustainability, he said.

Yet, Napoli said, Elon Musk may be in a position where its something hes able to subsidize and take a loss on if its something he feels that strongly about.

Indeed, Musk, the worlds richest person, said at the TED conference that he doesnt care about the economics at all regarding his bid for Twitter.

This is not a way to make money, he said.

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