Elon Musk says Twitter must be ‘politically neutral’ as some leftwing users quit
Elon Musk has said Twitter must be “politically neutral”, in a comment posted last night after a wave of account deletions by left-leaning users on the social media network.
In the days since Musk’s $44bn (£34.5bn) acquisition offer was accepted by Twitter’s board, hundreds of thousands of users have closed their accounts on the site, the company confirmed, leading to a dip in follower numbers for left-leaning politicians and celebrities such as Barack and Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift and Jeremy Corbyn.
Meanwhile, rightwing influencers such as the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Boris Johnson, and Ted Cruz have all had large gains as new users sign up for the service.
In the latest of a series of tweets about the platform he hopes to take into private ownership, the world’s richest man suggested he would not seek to politicise Twitter.
“For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” Musk tweeted yesterday evening.
In earlier comments, Musk has been outspoken about his desire to promote free speech on Twitter, saying that he is “against censorship that goes far beyond the law”.
“If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect,” Musk added. “Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
His statements have been interpreted as criticism of Twitter’s existing moderation policies, particularly of those that have affected the US right. The former president Donald Trump was banned from the social network in 2021 for his role in encouraging the storming of the US Capitol, while Greene had her personal account permanently suspended after breaking the platform’s
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