Bridget Todd, a director at UltraViolet, a women’s rights organization, said Mr. Musk’s deal could be treacherous for online speech because he might not be in favor of Twitter’s community standards and barring users who violated those standards.
“This is a massively slippery slope,” she said.
In Washington, Republicans, who have long accused Twitter of censoring their views, cheered Mr. Musk’s deal.
“I am hopeful that Elon Musk will help rein in Big Tech’s history of censoring users that have a different viewpoint,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said in a tweet.
Mr. Trump told Fox News on Monday that he would stick with posting on his own social network, Truth Social. “I am not going on Twitter,” he said, but added that he hoped “Elon buys Twitter, because he’ll make improvements to it.”
Democrats were restrained on the deal. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, declined to comment on Twitter’s sale specifically but said that President Biden “has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms” and that they should be “held accountable for the harms that they cause.” She said Mr. Biden supported changes to online-speech and antitrust laws.
Beyond speech issues, Twitter faces questions about its business. For years, the company has struggled to gain new users and keep others returning. Its advertising business, which is the main way Twitter makes revenue, has been inconsistent. Twitter has not turned a profit for eight of the last 10 years.
Last year, the company lost $493 million on revenue of $5.57 billion. In contrast, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, had profits of $39 billion and revenue of $118 billion last year.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/musk-twitter-sale.html
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