Writers use Twitter all the time. It seems counterintuitive, that wordsmiths whose life is longform prose would willingly restrict themselves to 280 characters, writes Gary Dalkin. But perhaps that’s the appeal, the very restriction means you can’t spend too long on a tweet when you should be writing a book, story or feature. What then does the purchase of the social media giant by Elon Musk, self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist’ (and world’s richest person) mean for writers, who are on the one hand, generally in favour of free speech, but on the other tend to be opposed to racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise prejudiced, bigoted and hateful rhetoric? At the time of writing some were already packing their digital bags and deleting their accounts, while others were adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach, wondering if Musk would really remove all moderation from the platform and adopt a truly anything goes policy — at least as far as the law allows.
The latter seems doubtful, not least because it would drive advertisers away, and business analysts calculate that the $44 billion the SpaceX entrepreneur paid for the company was vastly more than Twitter is worth, meaning keeping advertisers happy is going to be a priority. Further, on taking over the company in October Musk changed his Twitter handle to Chief Twit, because presumably he doesn’t know what one of those words means in the UK, and tweeted, ‘The bird is freed’. To which Thierry Breton, the Commissioner for the internet market in the European Union, swiftly replied, ‘In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.’