Musk Buys Twitter
NBC reported yesterday, Elon Musk has bought Twitter and plans to take the company private. Early on when rumors started to swirl about Musk’s wishes to buy the social media platform, commentators from every corner waited with bated breath hoping Musk would save the world from censorship. Musk stated, “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.”
When the deal was inked, Former President Donald Trump was asked if he will return to his Twitter account and told Fox News he declines in lieu of his own social media platform, Truth Social. Quite a curious response from the President, who had millions of followers previously.
Could it be that Trump’s ego will not allow him to go back to Twitter after they publicly kicked him off no matter who runs the company now? Does he believe Truth Social has a better chance of succeeding because it is his brainchild? No one knows for sure, however a couple of things which are troubling do not seem to be going away even if Musk has control of Twitter.
In his own words, Musk does not make assertion algorithms are going away. He only states the process will be more transparent to illicit more trust. How many times have you heard the Obama Administration claiming transparency with the end result of federal agencies under his control weaponized against American citizens.
Musk has an uphill battle to eliminate the “bots” of Twitter which remain a constant Trojan horse for the social media platform. A Carnegie Melon study looked at more than 200 million tweets since January 2020 that reference the novel coronavirus. It found that of the top 50 re-tweeters, 41 — 82 percent — were bots.
Just because Musk has acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars doesn’t mean he has the capacity to eviscerate all at once the working force he is inheriting. Simply, those who are working now have no problem with disinformation or censorship and will probably remain on the job for a while. What will that do for free speech? In the short term, absolutely nothing. It remains to be seen in the long term, but the very structure of Twitter, even under Musk, will not substantially change enough where a person can comment on immoral behavior of a society. You can bet your bottom dollar, there will remain an algorithm to stop any comment they deem “too Catholic or Christian” when commenting on our perverted culture.
So perhaps Donald Trump is on to something. Big tech has been so corrupted by the left it is inconceivable a total transformation will occur just because of new management. The corruption is so deep and the stakes are so high for the left a complete surrender to the principle of free speech remains dubious.
The fight for the culture and decency is far from over. With all of the pitfalls awaiting Twitter in the coming months and years, the only reasonable step to assure free speech seems to be a competing social media platform without the baggage which plagues Twitter. Then, at the very least, moral and wholesome people can have their values and beliefs presented to the public combatting the true disinformation which evil has produced.