Celebrate Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover! (But With Caution)

According to a tweet confirmed by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, as well as a Twitter press release, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has successfully bought out Twitter for $44 billion:

Below is a quote from Musk in the Twitter press release:

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. . .I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

This is something to celebrate! To be honest, I didn’t think it could happen—the US government (more specifically, the Biden regime), the UK government, the European Union (EU), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations (UN), the Gates Foundation, Big Tech, and others have made it clear, either in words or actions, that they want total globalist control of the internet (WEF was perhaps the most explicit on this topic). Elon Musk took on one of the most influential and pro-censorship social media platforms in the world and, seemingly, won. Musk put his money where his mouth was. That is all excellent—and it will be exciting to see what will happen with Twitter in the coming months!

On the other hand, I’m going to have to take an unpopular position and say that we should celebrate with caution. There are several reasons for this, and I welcome your thoughts on them in the comments!

1) Elon Musk is very invested in artificial intelligence (AI) and particularly the idea of microchips implanted into humans. His Neurolink chips would “record brain activity and potentially stimulate it,” a technology that Musk has compared to a “FitBit in your skull,” according to Insider. A man who wants to implant invasive microchips capable of recording brain activity into people’s brains, a man so enamored of AI, is not one we want to trust implicitly.

Can people with some problematic views still do a lot of truly wonderful and groundbreaking things? Of course—Donald Trump is the perfect example of that. On the other hand, even one area of blindness can affect a man’s greatness. Trump is still endorsing the Covid vaccines that have killed over 150,000 people just in the US. And don’t forget that Musk has had a friendly relationship with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was at least nominally in control on the platform while Twitter helped steal the 2020 election. Musk has also heavily invested in a Tesla branch in genocidal, heavily pro-censorship Communist China—in fact, he has a Tesla plant in Shanghai, where workers are reportedly suffering under tyrannical Covid lockdown measures.

2) I listed off some of the governments and organizations bent on achieving total control of the internet above, and it is as well not to assume they are giving up so easily (and yes, they are all connected—Twitter has partnered with the UN in the past, and Twitter code is reportedly embedded in some US government websites, for instance).

Whether through governmental regulation or resistance from within the company (I have reported before on how heavily leftist Twitter employee donations skew), the anti-free speech totalitarians will come back to fight another day. Does that mean we can’t see a lot of hope from Musk’s takeover? Of course not. On the other hand, we shouldn’t expect Twitter to become a pro-free speech platform too quickly. There are large numbers of leftist content regulators and fact-checkers at Twitter who won’t be changing their behavior in a hurry if they can help it.

3) My second point leads right to my third—we can’t let Musk do all the work. As I noted above, Twitter employees, judging by their political donations, are overwhelmingly leftist. For those conservatives who are skilled in the tech sphere, perhaps they might consider working for Twitter. That’s a less practical and immediate help, however, than ensuring that we only vote for and support politicians who are openly pro-free speech—and are willing to back that up with action. Catching Twitter bias and revealing it, calling out politicians for harming free speech, and donating to pro-free speech candidates and organizations are just a few ways that we can make sure that there is a real movement behind Musk.

Free speech can have the victory over censorship, but only if we constantly fight for it.