Elon Musk Buys Twitter: My Thoughts

Billionaire Elon Musk has officially struck a deal with Twitter to buy the social media platform for forty four billion dollars. Musk, the richest man in the world with a worth of nearly three hundred billion dollars according to Forbes, has bought the platform with the promise of bringing free speech to it.

The idea of freedom of speech on Twitter has had been a very controversial one over the past several years. In 2016, Twitter banned the then-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos over comments he made about Lessie Jones in relation to her role in the 2016 Ghostbusters. This also began a long trend of Twitter banning people with right-wing views — usually ones associated with the alt-right (although left-wing accounts have also been banned). Among the more infamous are Alex Jones, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer, Baked Alaska, Owen Benjamin, James Allusp, and even former President Donald Trump.

Typically, the argument has been that Twitter is a private company and it has the right to allow whatever it does or does not want on its platform. Personally, I do find this argument sympathetic, I do not believe that giving corporations the power to determine what views should and should not be allowed to be a good idea. The first amendment was written primarily to protect unpopular ideas, and moving the censorship from the public sector to the private one does not…