Whatever else Musk wants with Twitter — and obviously you should assume that he wants to make a lot of money — this seems like the ideological trend he hopes to resist or halt: the liberal retreat from dynamism, the progressive turn toward ideological regulation, the pervasive left-wing fear that the First Amendment and free speech are being weaponized by authoritarians and need some kind of check.
So now the question: If this was your ambition — setting aside whether you think it’s admirable or dangerous — would buying Twitter make sense?
The affirmative theory holds that because Twitter is both an essential digital town square and a place particularly populated by well-educated liberals, if Musk can make it succeed with a lighter-footprint approach to content moderation, from a dynamist perspective he might hope to accomplish two goals at once. First, he would be simply sustaining an important space in which free debate can happen. Second — assuming that he could come up with a light footprint that left-leaning users would accept — he would be gently training Twitter’s liberals back into their Obama-era belief that openness and dynamism are good things, that a marketplace of ideas can work without constant ideological supervision and constraint.
The more skeptical theory, on the other hand, suggests that Musk may be making a mistake somewhat characteristic of the Silicon Valley mentality and overestimating the importance of novel virtual spaces compared with the legacy institutions — East Coast, brick and mortar, academic and bureaucratic — that still give contemporary liberalism its actual shape and direction.
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