By Qingyun Shi ’23
Staff Writer
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, recently expressed uncertainty about whether his takeover bid for the social media service, Twitter, would be successful, according to an April 15 article from the BBC. Prior to the conference at which he communicated his doubts, Musk “offered to buy the company for $54.20 a share, valuing the firm at $43bn,” as reported by BBC. He also mentioned the existence of a “Plan B,” but did not disclose the content of the plan.
“I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” Musk said on Twitter when discussing his motivations for the takeover bid.
Professor emeritus of politics, Chris Pyle, criticized Musk’s intentions regarding free speech.
“Elon Musk wants to buy one of the biggest printing presses in the country and allow it to function largely without supervision. He claims to be a defender of free speech, but he’s not. He thinks of himself as a libertarian, but the ideas he wishes to liberate are those of rich people like himself. He really doesn’t understand that an unrestricted social media platform really doesn’t advance free speech. It will just advance the freedom of rich men like himself to distort the marketplace of political ideas, often with fake news,” Pyle said.
“Lots of mistakes are going to be made by well-meaning censors, before anything approaching a stable consensus on what should be allowable speech is going to be reached,” Pyle concluded.
Musk hasn’t been the only prominent figure to express interest in purchasing Twitter. Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — who claimed that he has a stake in Twitter through his investment firm Kingdom Holding Company — commented on Twitter about Musk’s offer. “I don’t believe that the proposed offer by Elon Musk comes close to the intrinsic value of Twitter given its growth prospects,” he said.
Musk replied immediately, asking how many Twitter shares Alwaleed bin Talal’s firm owns. Musk added, “What are the Kingdom’s views on journalist freedom of speech?”
Bryan Nakayama, a visiting lecturer in international relations and politics, discussed his opinion about Musk’s stated aim to promote free speech on the platform.
“Based on what I’ve seen, most users in the U.S. are able to express a fairly wide range of views and opinions from the mainstream to extreme. Speech is more restricted on certain topics — [such as] health-sensitive topics or types of speech, such as death threats or imagery of child sexual exploitation,” Nakayama said. “One sticky area is the question of disinformation and algorithmic radicalization — for people on the political extremes, something that is considered ‘disinformation’ would be a normal belief or interpretation of reality,” Nakayama continued.
“Who gets to adjudicate that is a difficult question. Similarly, there are attempts to stem the activity of extremist groups like QAnon,” Nakayama said. “There is no evidence of political bias in the moderation system, but automated moderation systems like Twitter can be gamed by individuals using mass reporting to get accounts taken down. The main clear area of ‘bias’ is in the … promotion algorithm, which favors the right.
