Elon, Twitter is not the town square – it’s just a private shop. The square belongs to us all | John Naughton

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Musk’s acquisition of the media platform will be a boon for free speech, he says. Governments are the ones to judge that

”. Twitter is just one small private shop in that space – a shop in which hyperventilating elites, trolls, journalists and millions of bots hang out and fight with one another.operates outside the first-amendment-obsessed US – in Europe, for example. Last Tuesday, Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, warned that Twitter must follow European rules on moderating illegal and harmful content online, even after it goes private. “We welcome everyone,” said Breton.

Ever since the Hong Kong democracy movement triggered a massive counterattack by Xi’s trolls on foreign social media, Twitter has removed thousands of Chinese accounts and slapped labels on state media tweets; stopped taking advertising from Chinese government stooges; and declined to cooperate with regime requests. The platform also provides a global platform for Xi’s critics.

This admirable commitment to free speech would produce exquisite and perhaps unbearable pain for its new proprietor. Tesla, which, after all, is his main gig, produces half of its cars in China and earns a quarter of its revenues there. As ReutersIt could, which is why one wonders if, in the end, Musk will just walk away from the acquisition. He’s a businessman, after all, and businessmen supposedly believe in the primacy of markets.

With a bit of luck, he will come to the conclusion that the price is much higher than he envisaged. In which case, those of us who believe that those rules should be determined by democratic institutions can breathe again.

 

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