Musk appears more open than some billionaires to allowing the expression of a wide range of views on social media. After all, someone who believes he should face no consequences for vilifying a rescue worker as a "pedo guy" for having a better idea than himself about how to save children trapped in a cave probably prefers to see free speech defined as broadly as possible.
"Controversy" is Musk's shtick, and being a "free speech absolutist" serves his aim of winning popular consent for his billionairedom in exactly the same way profiteering from vaccines does for Bill Gates. While they are busy raking in billions more at our expense, we are busy dividing into Team Musk or Team Gates. We cheer from the sidelines at our own irrelevance.
But one thing that Musk and Gates most assuredly agree on is that they and their ilk must never be swept into the dustbin of history. If we could ever harness Twitter to that end, we would quickly find out just how much of a "free speech absolutist" Musk really is.
'King of trolls'
This brings us to the second misguided "row" about Musk buying Twitter and its 217 million users: that his supposed commitment to free speech will further tear apart the health of our democracies. Put bluntly, the fear is that allowing Donald Trump and his followers back into the Twitterverse will unleash the forces of darkness we have been struggling to keep at bay.
Environmentalist George Monbiot, a columnist at the liberal establishment newspaper The Guardian, calls Musk's influence "lethal."
His colleague Aditya Chakrabortty visibly quivers with anxiety at the prospect of a Twitter molded in Musk's image, calling him the "king of trolls." Democracy, Chakrabortty avers, must defend itself not only from the Trumps but from those who enable them through their "free speech absolutism."
As is expected in such articles, Chakrabortty bolsters his argument with a statistic or two. For example, a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) finds that false stories on Twitter are 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. Putting Musk in charge of this lie factory will bring civilization crashing down, we are warned.
Let us set aside for a moment how MIT defines truth and falsehood, and assume it is capable of divining such things correctly. Again the study's logic is compelling only so long as we stare at a single tree and ignore the forest all around.
The reason billionaires and corporations - as well as states - want to control the media is precisely that a lie is more likely to fly than the truth. Our societies have been engineered on this principle since we divided into leaders and followers.
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