Money talks too much

A lot of people were relieved when Twitter parried Elon Musk's takeover grab, and are now worried about what happens next because free speech radical Musk seemed about to invite Donald Trump to start tweeting again. Should the one-time tweeter in chief get his Twitter account back?

For democracy to work, every citizen has to get a chance to put up a soapbox on the town square ( now called Twitter), including former presidents whose social media opus, even before Jan. 6, 2021, was vituperative, repetitive, assertive of the thing that was not so, and too too much. As I see it, Musk has the right idea about free speech.

That was easy, but here comes the big letdown. The former president has announced that, even if Elon Musk says please, he is not coming back to “very boring Twitter.” As it happens, Donald Trump never actually lost his soapbox — anybody who wanted to hear Trump has been able to hear Trump all along ­— and Donald Trump can build, not just a soapbox, but a complete platform of his own.

From school kids who may not be allowed to read certain books to the person who runs into a “disinformation” blockade on social media, the flow of ideas that nourishes an open society is a problem for a lot of people. Just not for Donald Trump or Elon Musk. Whether Musk gets to make new rules for Twitter or not, whether Trump tweets again or not, we're going to continue to hear plenty from both. That is because money not only talks, it won't shut up.

Some people worry that if Musk has his way, speech on Twitter might become dangerously free. More content moderation is needed, they believe, to stop an outpouring of disinformation. Others, and I'm one of them, say Twitter (and Facebook and YouTube …) are already censoring too much. Of course, if Musk's Twitter campaign succeeds, it won't matter what any of the rest of us think about more moderation or more free speech . One super rich person will have the last word, because he is super rich. That can't be the best way to decide an issue that matters to all of us.

If we want a world in which everybody has a say, we can't allow a few very rich voices to decide which ideas go. We could break up monopolies like Twitter, Facebook and Google. That way, people could choose among platforms to find one that suits their ideas on content moderation or not. Interestingly, thinkers as distant from one another on the political spectrum as Josh Hawley and Zephr Teachout suggest that approach. But too many of us already restrict ourselves to conversations with the like minded. The kind of you-all-come meeting placeTwitter might be , one where there is a chance of colliding with a new idea, is valuable.

We could declare platforms like Twitter and Facebook public utilities. That would give us those large, open to all meeting places, but there are problems with making some federal agency the ultimate speech and association czar.

Or we could decide to do without billionaires. If nobody has enough money to buy Twitter, no single individual controls that vital public square.

Neither Thomas Jefferson nor Theodore Roosevelt would have heard anything controversial in Justice Louis Brandeis' 1941 opinion that, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Now, after decades of accelerating inequality, Brandeis' words sound radical. Yet, when a lot of Americans start worrying that the wrong billionaire might get his hands on a site critical to the country's political discourse, and another billionaire can say he doesn't care since he has his very own public square now, the country is far enough out of whack, it may take more than a nudge to set it right.

——

Will Rawn of Havre is a retired Montana State University-Northern professor