No one would have known that making a “platform for free speech around the globe” would set one of the richest men in the world back $44 billion. On January, 31st, 2022 Elon Musk, the said rich man, famous CEO of Tesla and Starlink starting purchasing Twitter stocks and by April 14th 2022, when he proposed to outrightly buy the company and make it private from the publicly traded company it was, he already owned a staggering 9.2% market shares of the company. A very large number compared to the 2% shares owned by Jack, the equally famous Twitter’s founder.
Musk interest in buying the company was predicated on his idea that the text-based platform had been devoid of free speech and was overrun by space bots I.e., fake accounts. He believed that the current board of directors and large stakeholders, were not doing enough to rid the site of these and it was making it a menace in a democratic world.
Recall that Musk himself has over 100 million followers on the platform making him the third highest followed individual on Twitter after Barack Obama and Justin Bieber, but upon his acquisition of the company he is now the second most followed individual with 119 million followers. Elon Musk eventual purchase of Twitter on 27th of October, 2022 came after six months of negotiations and court battles.
As of December 2022, Elon Musk has reportedly laid off an estimated 3,700 workers from the company in addition to giving orders that serious work needed to be done in order to get the platform from where it currently is to where it needs to be. One policy that has been met with a lot of criticisms is the commercialization of the blue tick reserved for VVIPs on the platform and making it accessible to anyone who wanted it for $8 or its equivalent in other parts of the world. This was construed by many as an unnecessarily commonization of the platform and issues with fake accounts and impersonation became top of the list of discussions. In fact, Kathy Griffin – the comic – proved that making $8 dollars for the blue tick a mistake by changing the name of her account to Elon Musk and pretending to be the CEO which earned her a reprimand from the site.
What many on the front end don’t know is that even though Twitter is now a privately owned company thanks to Musk, the purchase of Twitter was not singlehandedly facilitated by Musk himself. Sources such as Morgan Stanley, other financial institutions including banks, Sequoia Capital, Qatar holding, Binance and Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal all contributed to the buying of the company.
Instances of restriction or ban of some far-right American politicians from the platform for racist, homophobic, antisemitic, anti-Islamic, hate speech, insurrectionist speech, treason, misinformation and transphobic tweets caused many to wonder if truly everyone has a fair chance at free speech because it was starting to look like some groups were more favoured than the other. If a contrasting or opposing view, deemed offensive, by some groups, was restricted in placation of some other groups then how truly free is free speech on the platform. It is noteworthy than Elon Musk himself has never been penalised on the platform for hate speech of any kind. But some critics have claimed that he does not buy
into the idea that some groups of people should have a restricted use of the platform because they had a different view than others.
Similarly, we should consider that Elon Musk is a business man at heart and some of his considerations might be that if some groups of people are perpetually restricted from airing their views on Twitter, over time it might cause the reduction of users on the platform. As a major shareholder, that is worrisome. We should consider than allowing some group of people to freely express their view in addition to the commercialisation of the blue tick has caused users like the Whoopi Goldberg, the legendary black American actor to opt out of using the platform.
While liberals are not at all pleased with some of the overt changes made at Twitter headquarters with the sacking of many employees especially top officials involved in the daily running of the account, there are some changes that have been made which are noteworthy. Musk removed Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) estimated at 44 thousand from the app; he reportedly released some content which relates to Hunter Biden, the son of the current US president Joe Biden, which the left has purportedly tried to redact in 2020 because he put them in a bad light. In addition, he also took down fake profiles whose users tried to circumvent the different security firewalls in place while making sure that contents relating to child sexual abuse/exploitation are detected faster than ever.
Despite the myriad of changes Elon Musk has made over the few months that he has been the CEO of Twitter, critics still believe it is early days yet for the app. There is still a need for the business that has been bleeding money for many years to turn the ink blue – pun intended. That being the crux of the matter, how can this business that has been losing money for a while now much to the ignorance of the public start earning money? We cannot say for sure that $8 dollars per month for the blue tick might not entirely cut it but it is the right step in the right direction.
