Is Elon Musk going to kill Twitter?

This is not a column I wanted to write. As someone who uses Twitter to a degree that might be described as “unhealthy”, I took a particular interest in the long-running saga of Elon Musk’s attempt to buy (and then get out of buying) the company. My hope was that his interest would pass, he’d find a way to wriggle out of the deal, and we could all get on with our lives. But with Twitter now worth only a fraction of the $54.20 per share he offered, the company’s board of directors had no choice but to call him on his bluff — and hand him control over the closest thing we have to a digital town square.

It hasn’t exactly been an auspicious start for Mayor Musk. By firing CEO Parag Agrawal and two other top Twitter executives, Musk had to pay out nearly $200 million in bonuses and stock options. That hit pales in comparison to the one he took on the deal, given that the entire tech market has crashed in the months after he made his offer to buy the company. As Pivot co-host Scott Galloway tweeted on Thursday, “Today Parag gained $42m, and Elon lost $33b. Let that sink in.”

That financial pain could pale in comparison to what’s still to come for Musk, given his own behaviour as Twitter’s new owner. In a letter to advertisers he promised that the site “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences….our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.” But those consequences almost certainly won’t apply to him, and his recent comments should give those advertisers plenty of pause.

On Saturday, Hillary Clinton tweeted a story from the LA Times about the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, perpetrated by a Canadian expat in thrall to Qanon conspiracy theories and other far-right bile. “In the months before police accused him of attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Friday morning,” the piece begins, “David DePape had been drifting further into the world of far-right conspiracies, antisemitism and hate, according to a Times review of his online accounts.”

But Musk wasn’t buying it. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” he tweeted at Clinton. To back up this claim he linked to a story from the Santa Monica Observer, a well-documented purveyor of misinformation that once reported Hillary Clinton had died and was replaced with a body double for a 2016 debate with Donald Trump. Its other greatest hits include false stories about Kanye West being appointed to Trump’s government, sunlight being an effective treatment for COVID-19 and Bill Gates being responsible for a polio epidemic.

Not exactly the New York Times, in other words. But it was good enough for Elon Musk, apparently, and that should raise serious doubts about both his ability to spot disinformation and his platform’s willingness to snuff it out. As American writer Molly Jong-Fast tweeted, “this exchange between @HillaryClinton and @elonmusk should kill any remaining confidence advertisers had in the platform.” In the ensuing backlash, Musk later deleted the tweet.

It should also attract the attention of government officials in countries where Twitter operates — including Canada. It’s time — long past time, actually — for them to regulate these social media platforms more aggressively and stop them from serving as amplifiers of misinformation, fear, and loathing. The spread of conspiracy theories around COVID-19 on these platforms, and the damage that’s done to public health and safety, should be all the evidence these governments need to act.

But if they need more, apparently Musk is determined to give it to them. It’s abundantly clear, given both his statements about being a “free speech absolutist” and his own interventions on Twitter, that Musk isn’t going to crack down on the spread of misinformation or conspiracy theories. That those are poisoning the public square he now owns and contributed directly to the violence he says he abhors, whether it’s the January 6th coup attempt or any number of lesser incidents, doesn’t seem to register with him.

He may yet rein himself in, if only because his behaviour on Twitter now affects the bankers and financiers who backstopped his purchase of the company. If things get really ugly, it could damage the value of Tesla’s brand, sink its stock even further, and even threaten his ownership of the company. But government regulators can’t depend on Musk’s financial imperatives to save him from himself. They may need to do it for him.

The rest of us, including those who are unapologetically addicted to his platform, need to keep our eyes peeled for new alternatives. Like most journalists, politicians, and other public affairs junkies, I’ll stay on Twitter because I have to — and because, even for all of its multiplying warts, I still enjoy it. But if another credible alternative arises, one that can actually create the sort of “warm and welcoming” environment Musk talked about, he could be left holding a $44 billion bag filled with little more than a bunch of Russian bots and MAGA trolls. Free speech, after all, doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences that flow from it — even for the richest man in the world.