Musk’s intentions aren’t clear. Is he hoping to make a profit? Or does he expect to lose money in serving the public interest while amusing himself? He might not know; he might not care. Whatever the answers, it’s hard not to be impressed by what he’s already achieved and his astonishing appetite for new challenges. I, for one, am looking forward to what happens next.
As it stands, the “town square” principle doesn’t really work. In a truly public space, protections for free speech are far-reaching. They permit speech so dishonest or disgusting that it would repel not just political partisans but all decent people regardless of their ideological attachments. These protections also forbid prior restraint. Twitter isn’t a public space in that sense, so it retains the right to control its content and disqualify users.
User-enabled moderation of content would be better than the slanted top-down policing of news and opinion that Twitter has sometimes engaged in. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem — one by no means confined to Twitter: In the US, at least, there is no longer any such thing as a trusted authority.
Many — let’s call them legacy moderators — have taken it upon themselves to defend Truth as opposed to truth. Academic experts, reporters, fact-checkers and the like are much to blame for knowingly or otherwise indulging their own political biases. They police opinions, not facts, undermining their own authority.