The Economist April 30th 2022 55
BusinessTwitterA bird in the hand
E
lon musk, the world’s richest man, has
described Twitter as the “de facto public
town square”. On April 25th he struck a deal
to take it private. Mr Musk, the boss of
companies including Tesla, a carmaker,
and SpaceX, a rocket firm, put together an
allcash offer worth about $44bn, stump
ing up the bulk of the financing himself in
the form of $21bn in equity and a $12.5bn
loan against his shares in Tesla. It amounts
to one of the largest buyouts in history. If
it is a big deal in business terms, it could be
bigger still in what it means for the future
of online speech.
Twitter isn’t an obviously attractive
business. With 217m daily users it is an or
der of magnitude smaller than Facebook,
the world’s largest social network, and has
slipped well behind the likes of Instagram,
TikTok and Snapchat. Its share price has
bumped along for years. It is like a mod
ernday Craigslist, writes Benedict Evans, a
tech analyst: “Coasting on network effects,
building nothing much, and getting un
bundled piece by piece.”
But Mr Musk isn’t interested in Twitter
as a business. “I don’t care about the economics at all,” he told a ted conference
earlier this month. “This is just my strong,
intuitive sense that having a public plat
form that is maximally trusted and broadly
inclusive is extremely important to the fu
ture of civilisation.”
His willingness to spend a chunk of his
fortune on making Twitter more “inclu
sive” follows a period in which it has tight
ened its content moderation. A decade ago
Twitter executives dubbed the company
“the freespeech wing of the freespeech
party”. But the presidency of Donald Trump
and the covid19 pandemic persuaded
Twitter (and most other social networks)
that free speech had drawbacks. Mr Trumpwas eventually banned from Twitter, as
well as Facebook, YouTube and others,
after the Capitol riot of January 2021. Twit
ter began to label and block what it judged
to be misinformation about covid and oth
er subjects. In the first half of 2021 it re
moved 5.9m pieces of content, up from
1.9m two years earlier. In the same period
1.2m accounts were suspended, an in
crease from 700,000.
Mr Musk has said that in the name of
transparency he will publish Twitter’s
code, including its recommendation algo
rithm. He proposes to authenticate all us
ers, which might help to reduce anony
mous trolling, and vows to “defeat the
spam bots”. He has mooted the idea of rely
ing less on advertising, which provides
90% of Twitter’s revenue, and more on
subscriptions, which would mean the firm
could worry less about advertisers taking
flight from contentious content.
Most controversially among users, he
has said he will be “very cautious with per
manent bans”, preferring “timeouts”. This
suggests a reprieve for blocked politicians
such as Mr Trump, as advocated by groups
including the American Civil Liberties Un
ion, which counts Mr Musk as one of its
largest donors. Mr Trump said this week
that he would never return to Twitter, but
many doubt he could resist; he has posted
only one message to his own littleused
Twitter rival, Truth Social, since its glitch
beset launch in February.
There is lots of scepticism, not least
among Twitter users, about Mr Musk’s proElon Musk promises to make online speech freer. That is harder than it sounds→Alsointhissection
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