You can accuse Elon Musk of a lot of failure if you look at his work on Twitter from the outside. Since its purchase, chaos has reigned in the group, umpteen executives and employees have been dismissed or have given up. And the short message service has also become more chaotic for its users, which is why they are leaving the network in droves.
But Musk isn’t doing anything wrong on Twitter. The fact that the multi-billionaire released the accounts of ex-US President Donald Trump and most recently the (even more controversial) Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on the platform was a step in the right direction.
Yes, Trump has been and continues to be conspicuous with blatant false statements and hate speech – on public stages and on Twitter. And yes, Greene spread and spread conspiracy theories and does not shy away from anti-Semitic statements.
When something like this happens on Twitter, it’s right to delete such posts, and the platform has every right to temporarily block users in question. When laws are broken, there shouldn’t even be a debate about it.
However, permanently banning a former US President or MP from a social network is not a good idea per se. After all, their opinions consider democratic majorities to be legitimate, painful as that may be. In any case, it should not be up to private-sector corporations to completely ignore their points of view.
Twitter users who are now saying goodbye to the platform because of Musk, Trump and Greene have to learn again that freedom of expression means one thing above all: tolerating other opinions – no matter how crude, not at all or even incorrectly justified.
In such cases, the motto must be: counteract. But don’t shut up, not even on Twitter. That would only be fodder for mostly absurd “cancel culture” theses. The fact that Musk counters these with radical freedom of expression is to be welcomed. Of course, anything that violates the law must still be removed from Twitter. Musk will have to be measured by that too.
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