The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal is warning that a reported breakdown in negotiations between Elon Musk and Twitter in the tech mogul’s bid to purchase the social media company is bad news for free discourse.
Calling a potential busted deal “a loss for the social-media site as well as for political free speech,” the Journal wrote in a Sunday editorial “the only winners” from Musk walking away from the deal “will be progressives who support the site’s censorship of views that don’t conform to theirs on politics, climate and many other subjects.”
“Mr. Musk may be hoping to negotiate a lower purchase price, but if he does walk away it will be a loss for political discourse,” the newspaper continued. “Tweets by conservatives that present even purely factual information about subjects like Covid treatments and climate are often labelled misinformation. Accounts are suspended without explanation, and appeals go answered. Nobody knows who the wizards are behind the curtains making these decisions, and Mr. Musk says he’d allow more open debate.”
Musk in a financial filing on Friday afternoon said he had terminated his agreement to buy Twitter, claiming the company “is in material breach of multiple provisions.”
The tech billionaire has over the last several weeks been pressing the social network to turn over specific data relating to bots, content moderation and other policies.
Musk needs that information, his representatives said in the filing, in order to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.”
The chairman of Twitter’s board rejected those assertions on Friday, saying the company is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon” and willing to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement.
The Journal’s conservative editorial board has heaped praise on Musk for his repeated criticisms of Silicon Valley tech companies that he and others have alleged apply a double standard when regulating political speech on their platforms.
“A Musk purchase would be a free-market solution to the progressive dominance of tech platforms. Republicans are promising to target tech-company censorship if they win control of Congress in November, and Twitter will be one of the first in line,” the Journal wrote this week.
“Twitter can help itself by ending its one-sided political censorship, but its woke staff and corporate culture might make that impossible. The company might find it needed Mr. Musk more than he needed Twitter.”