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Elon Musk is Wrong About Free Speech
I have been thinking about free speech a bit lately because of all the talk of Musk buying Twitter, which he has now reversed. His motivations, he claimed, were that the platform functioned as the marketplace of ideas, the “town square.”
In some sense, he’s right about Twitter being the home to some political public debate. At the same time, very few people have Twitter accounts. Despite that, Musk seems to have backed down because of the widespread presence of bots on the problem. This is a real problem that the platform has which I won’t get into here. But it should suffice to say that they are incentivized to keep those bots there because their value goes up based on users.
In the initial stages, Musk justified his purchase because of the need of defending this “town square.” So, let’s see if he understands free speech in the first place.
In an infamous interview, TED released with Musk, the CEO of Tesla had the opportunity to comment on free speech. It wasn’t a particularly insightful talk, to be honest. But Musk manages to address some of my concerns with his views, namely that it is impossible to universalize free speech laws for different nationalities on Twitter.
Look, I understand that Musk is a successful man. Before the Musk fans out there come at me in the comments, I am aware of his…
