“Free speech” as it’s defined in the Constitution—which means the government cannot arrest you for expressing opinions it doesn’t like—actually has very little to do with Twitter, a private corporation with full authority to ban as many Nazis, public health threats, and abusive, revenge porn-posting exes as it deems fit.
“It is imperative that Twitter’s Board of Directors acknowledge that with Musk in charge, Donald Trump, who had been banned from the platform for repeated violations of terms of service and incitement to violence, including right-wing extremists and white supremacists, will likely have their accounts restored,” Todd said. “Republicans in Congress are already cheering Musk’s bid for Twitter—and looking forward to this exact moment.
As concerned as I am with everything about this ordeal, I’m still, above all else, just deeply annoyed. A rich white man isparading out a pseudo-intellectual conception of free speech as an excuse to reduce women and marginalized people’s digital lives to targets for sexists and white supremacists, and their human rights to abstract, stupid thought experiments. And because he has $44 billion in cash , we all have to just watch it happen.