Elon Musk’s Version of Twitter Was to Be a Town Hall for Sharing Civil Discourse – What Has Gone Wrong?

In 2022, Elon Musk, best known for Tesla, and SpaceX, for an appearance on the TV comedy “The Big Bang,” for numerous TED Talks, public interviews, keynote speeches at conferences, and sound and light shows at Tesla investor events, spent $44 billion to purchase Twitter. Musk was an early Twitter adopter, posting his first Tweet in 2010 and eventually gathering 80 million followers before making his bid to acquire the company.

He had told a TED2022 Conference audience that he was motivated to acquire Twitter, now renamed X, to turn it into a platform for free speech across the planet. He talked about it as being a public commons, an open town hall where ideas could be shared and discussed.

Unless you have attended public town halls which I have from my past work with government representatives, you don’t know how quickly they can descend into chaos. An individual with a beef can take over a town hall discussion and destroy the meeting of minds and public harmony in short order.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Musk has beefs and has now become not just the town crier, but also the dissenter who shows up to comment and post on the site. To make things worse Musk has invited back a bunch of dissenters who spout extremist conspiracy theories, or content that was previously banned on the site.

It is hard to fathom why Musk has chosen this path for X which is not paying for itself and losing subscribers and advertisers. Maybe the simplest explanation is the right one. Maybe it is just about a man with a giant ego and too much money to burn.

I have admired Musk for his vision regarding electric vehicles (EVs) and how their adoption can help the planet end its addiction to fossil fuels. I equally endorse the work at SpaceX to make rockets reusable to drive down the cost of getting to space. The Starlink satellite network is today making the Internet accessible to more people on Earth than at any time previously. It is truly raising all boats and has attracted copycats like Jeff Bezos who has begun to belatedly launch Kuiper, a competitor.

NASA has become reliant on SpaceX in ways no one a decade ago would have predicted. SpaceX ferries crews to the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX resupply and return Dragon capsules bring work being done on the ISS back to Earth, something no other suppliers can do.

Tesla EVs have been the key disrupters of the automobile industry with the traditional dominant companies in this sector rapidly altering plans to move from internal combustion engine vehicles to ones running on electric batteries.

In a headline article that appeared on the Huffington Post online news site yesterday, it reads “Elon Musk Calls Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory ‘The Actual Truth.'” There is little to admire about Twitter’s evolution to X under Musk’s ownership. Before it was X, Twitter content was moderated to remove hate speech. But today, X disseminates hatred, racism, and anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish propaganda. In the defence of free speech on the platform, Musk appears to be siding with these new truths about race and religion and endorsing antisemitic conspiracy theories. So much for creating a public town hall where ideas get discussed in an environment where civil discourse is respected.