The price of free speech: why Elon Musk's $44bn vision for Twitter could fall apart – The Guardian

Contained within 95 pages of dense legal jargon, the warning from Twitter to Elon Musk was clear: don’t use your considerable power on the social media platform to attack the company.The world’s richest man and owner-in-waiting of Twitter signed an agreement for the planned $44bn (£35bn) takeover last week confirming that he could tweet about the deal so long as “such tweets do not disparage the company or any of its representatives”.Yet hours later the self-described “free speech absolutist” was engaging with tweets criticising senior Twitter staff, including an interaction with a political podcast host who had labelled the company’s legal head, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s “top censorship advocate”. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal head, was the victim of a pile-on sparked by a Musk tweet. Photograph: Mike Blake/ReutersThe inevitable consequence for Gadde was one of the grimmer phenomena of social media: a pile-on. Comments included calls for her to lose her job and, in a typical example of unpleasant digital hyperbole, statements that Gadde would “go down in history as an appalling person”.Announcing the deal to buy Twitter last week, Musk said: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital…
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