Elon Musk may be Twitter overlord, but he's not our saviour

It’s been a rollercoaster month for Twitter.

I’ll be honest. When the Pretorian-born billionaire Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter in early April, I thought this wasn’t really a story. ‘Musk is a bored middle aged man with too much money,’ I said to friends at the time, ‘but he’ll soon tire of the game and be done with it. Nothing to worry about, he’s trolling us all.’ 

It took less than a month for my prediction to be proven utterly wrong.

Fast forward just over two weeks and the board of Twitter confirmed it was selling the platform to the ‘free speech absolutist’ for $44 billion. Cue concern and confusion from many a twitter user, and hot takes throughout the land, myself obviously included. But why was Musk making this move, on a company that (despite its cultural importance) hadn’t figured out how to be sustainably profitable? ‘This isn’t a way to make money,” he told the TED2022 conference. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilisation.” 

To save the ‘future of civilisation’, no less. Classic Elon energy. But discerning how a wealthy, white, apartheid-era billionaire taking Twitter private will make it ‘maximally trusted’ and ‘broadly inclusive’ is not quite clear. 

''Freedom of speech, or expression, as it was originally conceived by John Stuart Mill, was about ideas competing against one another, on an equal and level playing field, in order to find out which idea is the best. Society is then pushed forward through discourse and consensus building. Musk, on the other hand, seems to want free speech for the sake of it, regardless of what the playing field looks like, or how unjust and unequal the power dynamics may be.''

This is not the first time Elon has acquired power and position through a hostile takeover. Some might argue it was the same route he took to leading Tesla, the electric car company he is most well known for. Initially founded by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Musk joined in 2004 as an investor, then became chairman of the board. His eventual takeover as CEO in 2008 was mired in controversy, and Eberhard soon sued Musk for libel and slander, alleging Musk was attempting to ‘rewrite history’. Although the pair settled, the feud continued for years. A diplomat, Musk is not. 

Founding debates aside however, Elon Musk’s past endeavours have typically been large, ambitious technical projects. Space X, for example, is about building rockets and taking the human race to other planets. Tesla is about mainstreaming the electric car. The Boring Company is about drilling tunnels to get rid of traffic jams. Putting aside how we might personally feel about these aims, they are at least tangible, technical challenges that could be measured, benchmarked, and worked towards. 

With Twitter, the goals are much more nebulous. An edit button, open sourcing the algorithm, tackling spam bots, and a ‘free speech first’ content moderation policy. To what end? This remains unclear.

Certainly, Musk has underlined his belief in the importance of the ‘public square’, which is how he describes Twitter, but he seems to forget the point of the square. Freedom of speech, or expression, as it was originally conceived by John Stuart Mill, was about ideas competing against one another, on an equal and level playing field, in order to find out which idea is the best. Society is then pushed forward through discourse and consensus building.

Musk, on the other hand, seems to want free speech for the sake of it, regardless of what the playing field looks like, or how unjust and unequal the power dynamics may be. Ironically, he seems less interested in engaging genuinely with other people’s ideas of what is good for the world, and more in people being able to say what they want without consequence.

What is the point of freedom of speech if not to engage with each other, in good faith, towards constructive ends? Elon’s approach betrays a frankly naive and simplistic understanding of a complex, philosophical concept. 

As someone who has studied and worked as an engineer, I am somewhat amused by the ‘technical/engineering’ approach to the social and cultural challenges folks around the world have been working on for years. Although some of Twitter’s obstacles today might be business related, they are also deeply about human beings and society.

There are no easy answers here, no simple technical solution. A tech-utopian approach, one where we believe the solution lies necessarily in the technology, not the power dynamics and context surrounding it, will be doomed to fail. 

Ultimately, it is unclear what Musk buying Twitter means for the platform just yet. But as we hold our breath and wait, this in itself is my current takeaway from all this hullabaloo. It is a reminder that we live in a world so unequal in its power distribution that a single man can raise enough money over the course of a couple of days to buy a platform millions rely on for news, debate and community, and there’s nothing we - users - can do about it.

Seemingly overnight, we can find ourselves beholden to the same man who disregards human rights abuses when expanding business interests, who retaliates against critics, who accepts a culture of racism in his own company. A man who frankly knows almost nothing about content moderation, but so believes in his own power and brilliance, that he thinks he alone can be the answer to all the platform’s woes, and ultimately, save democracy and ‘the future of civilisation’. 

Good Lord. Oh, to be liberated from the whims of powerful, arrogant, un-wise men. That is truly my Ramadan wish. 

Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese-Australian author and social justice advocate. She is a regular columnist for The New Arab.

Follow her on Twitter: @yassmin_a

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.