Musk can't "un-bias" Twitter -- but he can "re-bias" it

Media employees and incumbent Twitter employees alike tend view their world — one without Republicans — as the normal one, and the values and policies that get promulgated out of that world as the neutral and moderate ones. From their point of view, Musk — the electrification and decarbonization guy, who used to be for Obama but is now quite sour on Democrats — looks like a right-wing extremist who must want to turn the platform into Gab. As such the reaction to him taking over a platform is garment-rending and panic, even though his politics are a lot closer to the median voter’s than theirs are.

I have my own concerns about Musk’s likely stewardship of Twitter — in particular, I think his business interests make him likely to be too solicitous of the concerns of Chinese communists. I also think Musk has often been glib about the challenges of moderation, which is both impossible to get right and necessary to do anyway, for reasons laid out well here by Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman.1 But there is one fairly limited goal that I do think Musk is very likely to achieve: While it won’t be possible for Twitter to get out of the moderation business, and while nobody could possibly de-bias Twitter’s moderation decisions, I do believe Musk will be able to re-bias them in a way that better reflects the actually existing spectrum of political opinion in the United States.

I’m honestly a little baffled when people look at the record and the personnel involved in Twitter’s moderation decisions and deny that the company has shown a liberal bias.

[I’m not baffled by that. I consider it part of a deliberate denial campaign to force-shift an Overton window for polite debate firmly and completely into the progressive wing of the political spectrum. But otherwise, I’m largely in agreement with Barro. — Ed]