Does Elon Musk’s billionaire buyout give new license to hate speech?
But when fellow Silicon Valley revolutionary Elon Musk moved to buy Twitter — a company he terms a “digital town square” — last month in a deal worth $44 billion, he might as well have invaded Ukraine, judging by the frenzy of liberal opposition.
“This deal is dangerous for our democracy. Billionaires like Elon Musk play by a different set of rules than everyone else, accumulating power for their own gain,” tweeted Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, in what was representative of the genre.
“What exactly does Musk believe can’t be said on the platform right now?” asked one New York Times op-ed. “It certainly doesn’t take long to find discredited race science, arguments that women are intellectually inferior, anti-Semitism… It is easy to assume that the banned speech that Mr. Musk is standing up for is even worse than that.”
As usual, it was the multibillionaire himself who responded most aptly.
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