I Demand That Twitter Be a Forum in Which the Internet's Saltiest Morons De-pants Themselves

The little-discussed up-side of free speech

Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter. He’s made an all-cash offer worth $43 billion; spare a thought for the poor fuck who gets stuck behind Musk the day he withdraws $43 billion from the Wells Fargo ATM. Musk says that he doesn’t care about the economics at all, and that he wants to make Twitter a “platform for free speech” and a “de facto town square”. Which I don’t doubt, though I’m sure it’s also crossed his mind that some sort of “keep me from committing securities fraud by tweeting while on acid” feature would also be nice.

Musk’s bid led to histrionic reaction on Twitter. Which isn’t surprising — any event on Earth can probably be tagged with: “…which led to histrionic reaction on Twitter.” The sentence: “A bunny sniffed a tulip in a meadow, which lead to histrionic reaction on Twitter” is probably true 365 days a year. The current cycle of pants-wetting is round 835,295,315,472 of the debate over content moderation on social media, which is, ironically, a strong argument against the value of open debate. Because we probably won’t solve jack shit here; this discussion is less like philosophers trading bon mots in the Greek forum and more like two hillbillies on a riverbank trying to shove mud down each others’ pants. If you could teleport John Stuart Mill to the present day, and show him that the subject of and the forum for our civic debate is an app that’s basically the Pith-Bot 5000, which shut-ins and opportunists use to dunk on each other using Ace Ventura GIFs, he’d probably become a devoted backer of enlightened despotism on the spot.