Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Reveals the Left For What It Is

Twitter made one of its most surprising business decisions in recent history, and sold itself to Elon Musk. Musk paid $44B for this privilege. It was almost certainly an ideological move, as Musk is a vocal critic of Twitter’s information flow management. Immediately upon the news of the buyout breaking, Musk tweeted, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functional democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. 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 spambots, and authenticating all humans.”

These seem to be worthwhile, but anodyne objectives. Not less speech. Not less transparency.

Yet, the Left political Left was utterly insane. Charles Blow The New York TimesMusk pledged to quit the military. In fact, the hashtag #LeavingTwitter was trending on Twitter. The American Civil Liberties Union, while noting that Musk is a card-carrying member, fretted, “there’s a lot of danger having so much power in the hands of anyone individual.” Meanwhile, a powerful individual with consolidated power Jeff Bezos worried over the possibility of Chinese influence on Twitter: “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the deal “dangerous for our democracy.” MSNBC’s Ari Melber hilariously agonized, “You could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the elections.

Ari, that’s right. This was the worry for millions when social media tried to suppress the Hunter Biden story. They also locked the accounts of Trump-associated officials, who then decided to throw out former President Donald Trump from all of his services. This was a concern of Musk when he purchased the service.

It is important to note two things about the Left’s overwhelming panic over Musk’s purchase. The Left understood Twitter as a crucial part of the ecosystem. It is an ideological platform created to conceal its biases and promote a political agenda. The Left has claimed for years that concerns over Twitter bias by conservatives were simply paranoia. The Left is now in a state of profound apoplexy after Musk’s acquisition. They wouldn’t do that if Twitter weren’t their exclusive property.

There’s also the larger problem. The Left hates transparency and freedom of speech in politics. The Left would prefer secret algorithms that conceal “shadow-banning” and bottlenecking; the Left prefers “equity” in a speech to freedom of speech. To the Left, the potential “harm” of allowing free speech outweighs the value of open debate. It is better to ban The Babylon Bee from stating Lia Thomas was a man, than allow such content be shared around Twitter. And it’s even worse to not let anyone know about the algorithm behind these bans. Transparency is the key to accountability. The power lies in the fact.

Musk must make it clear that Twitter has used its past practices to disclose information. This will allow for transparency in any future algorithms and to fire those who are opposed to them. Musk might be just what is needed to restore social media trust. However, Musk must bulldoze all those responsible for destroying that trust.