The Bad, Ugly, and Ignorant Reactions to Elon Musk’s Purchase of Twitter

Well, he really did it. Tesla CEO Elon Musk made an above-market offer for Twitter and, after much talk of using poison pills to avoid handing the reigns over to the South African billionaire, Twitter’s board of directors reached an agreement with Musk on Monday. It was the darkest day on Earth since net-neutrality repeal.

Or at least it might seem that way, judging by the hysterical reaction of much of the mainstream press.

CBS’s Norah O’Donnell fretted behind an anchor’s desk that a “hands-off approach” might “make Twitter a haven for disinformation and hate speech” before going on to claim that “Musk has used the platform to bully critics and bully reporters who have written about him or his companies.” O’Donnell provided no examples to support her characterization.

Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN+, wondered aloud if Musk’s takeover might result in a mass exodus from the platform. “If you get invited to something where there are no rules, where there is total freedom for everybody, do you actually want to go to that party or are you going to decide to stay home?” asked Stelter.

Los Angeles Times columnist Erika Smith urged readers to “consider this the beginning of the end of #BlackTwitter,” quoting unattributed tweets and a single associate professor at Northeastern University to explain the declaration.

At the New York Times, editorial board member Greg Bensinger calls Musk’s Twitter “a scary place.” “Female Twitter users, in particular, ought to worry about whether Mr. Musk will bring his apparent disdain for women to the company he is about to own,” writes Bensinger, who cites a joke made by Musk last fall as evidence.  Bensinger also warns readers that Musk’s goal of turning Twitter into “an inclusive arena for free speech” will also mean “free speech for people like Mr. Musk, a billionaire and the world’s richest man.” The horror.

Elsewhere at the Times, Anand Giridharadas submits that state-enforced “guardrails” on social media companies would preserve freedom for those who deserved it, while Musk’s vision would free “Nazis to Nazi.”

Similarly, purported human rights watchdogs, including the ACLU — that of Skokie March-defending fame — all expressed varying degrees of concern over the news. ACLU executive director Anthony Romero made a vague reference to the “real-life impacts in discourse” while a representative at Human Rights Watch explained that “freedom of expression is not an absolute right.”

Incredibly, Ari Melber of MSNBC found himself panicking on-air that Musk “could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates — all of its nominees. Or you could just turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.” It was quite the hypothetical for a progressive to present in a world where Donald Trump has been banned from the platform and a since confirmed story, linking Hunter Biden to a laptop making reference to Joe Biden’s involvement in his business dealings, was suppressed in the weeks before the 2020 election.

Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration has expressed its own concerns. White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to comment explicitly on the purchase, instead opting for the not-so-veiled reminder that, “we’ve long talked about, and the President has long talked about his concerns about the power of social media platforms, including Twitter, and others, to spread misinformation, disinformation, the need for these platforms to be held accountable.”