The richest man in the world has decided to use some of his vast fortune to promote free speech in a real and practical way. Elon Musk has literally put his money where his mouth is.
Musk is prepared to use part of his fortune to transform Twitter into a vehicle for free speech. In essence, he has called into question their existing model which he recognizes has become an extension of cancel culture.
The most visible sign that Twitter acts as a censor is their banning of former President Donald Trump. But Twitter’s censorship goes wider than Trump and extends to a clear bias in favour of left-liberal social progressivism. This bias means Twitter’s decision-making processes actively limit the circulation of conservative and right-wing views.
Musk’s intervention to try and remove this Twitter bias has drawn attention to the fact that social media generally has mutated into what Musk calls a “civilizational problem.” And something needs to be done to fix this.
Western society has thrived because of open social debate. When all voices can join the social debate, the West thrives because a struggle between ideas (good and bad) occurs.
It turns out that a diversity of opinion guarantees a vibrant society. And because ideas have had to compete in the West’s system of open social debate, Western civilization has thrived and grown.
But this old Western model of open communication seems to be in danger now because the emergence of social media has given rise to the growth of hugely powerful communication phenomena such as Facebook (Meta), Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and Wiki.
All of these can broadly be said to be infected by Silicon Valley culture—a culture characterized by its left-leaning woke progressivism and its promotion of homogenizing cosmopolitan globalization. Those socialized into Silicon Valley culture display a zealotry for promoting social progressivism coupled with hostility to ideas that are conservative, traditionalist, or nationalist.
That the people running organizations like Twitter and Facebook are left-leaning is perfectly fine. But what is not fine is when they use their decision-making roles to skew social communication by removing some voices from the social debates taking place.
The result is discourse closure. This happens because (as Musk pointed out) Twitter and Facebook program their computers and algorithms to foreground some ideas, marginalize other ideas, and kill yet others. They also employ content moderators to actively censor postings.
The result is that our social debates are skewed leftwards. Within this anti-free speech model of social media, right-leaning voices get routinely silenced on Twitter and Facebook.
To make matters worse, because journalists are heavy users of Twitter and Facebook, this algorithmic and content moderator driven censorship spills over to also impact the content of mainstream newspaper and television news through the de facto system of copy-cat journalism.
So what has Elon Musk done to try and fix the Orwellian system of discourse closure that social media is creating?
It began with Musk buying 9.2 percent of Twitter shares. This led to Musk being offered a place on Twitter’s Board. But Musk declined because he realized this would have trapped him into decisions made by a board that had already demonstrated its Silicon Valley values and propensity for anti-free speech decision-making.
Instead, Musk offered to pay $43 billion to buy all of Twitter so that he could “unlock its potential” for promoting free speech and open social debate.
Musk made it clear that he was not doing this as a financial investment. He was not driven by a belief that owning Twitter would make him even richer. Rather he was driven by a social motivation to turn Twitter into a fully functioning “town square” where open dialogue could take place.
Musk said he wanted Twitter to become a place where conversations could happen with as few constraints as possible.
So the billionaire is prepared to use his money to produce a social good (free speech) not a private good (personal profit). His aim, he said, was to turn Twitter into a “bastion of free speech” because he believes Western civilization benefits from open dialogue and suffers from restrictions of social dialogue.
Some cynics questioned this, implying that rich businessmen are only ever driven by profit motives. But Musk convinced me perhaps because I recognize echoes of our shared roots in a Pretoria-made culture of the 1980s that produced idiosyncratic characters with a strong belief in freedom of speech.
Importantly, during a TED-talk Musk also demonstrated he had thought about the practical difficulties and complexities of implementing free speech in an imperfect world. Yet despite understanding the difficulties, Musk revealed an unambiguous commitment to free speech.
Two things that Musk said convinced me he would make a fantastic owner of Twitter. One was his pronouncement that free speech means allowing people to say things you do not personally like. Secondly, he said that when deciding whether free speech should or should not be applied when confronting a wicked moral dilemma, he would “err on the side of free speech.” Bravo Elon Musk.
Ultimately, Musk shows that he understands freedom of speech is not some abstract “given” right. He is not arguing from the position of a left-liberal who believes they have “discovered” universal rights and truths that they are entitled to impose on all humans in all contexts.
Rather, Musk recognizes that freedom of speech is something that has to be worked for and struggled for because it facilitates freedom and dialogue which makes us all better off.
Musk is effectively doing his bit in the struggle to make free speech possible. And he is prepared to put an awful lot of money into that struggle.
Musk has (correctly) come to the conclusion that Twitter is currently an organization that delivers restricted speech. As he said he wants to fix the broken Twitter model so as to unleash its potential to be an organization that provides a platform where all voices are welcome such that a full and open social dialogue can take place. Musk is talking about Western civilization at its best.
So how did the Twitter board react to Musk’s offer? Well they have tried to block him by approving a “poison pill” which allows existing Twitter shareholders to buy additional shares at lower prices so as to dilute the percentage Musk holds.
Shame on you Twitter for your response. This simply reveals much about the people running Twitter. Their actions confirmed my worst suspicions about their values and motivations.
But as Musk says his struggle for free speech is not yet over and he has pointed to the enormous legal and financial consequences the Twitter board has opened itself up to.
One can only hope Musk wins the battle to free Twitter from the control of those who want to stop open debate and use social media as a vehicle to push their own one-sided agendas.
