Why Elon Musk's Twitter takeover is dangerous

“The bird is freed,” Elon Musk tweets after acquiring Twitter for 44 billion dollars. What he means by freedom, he demonstrates immediately: the freedom to fire a large share of employees. The freedom to say anything imaginable. The freedom to reinstate far-right accounts. And the freedom to share dubious conspiracy narratives himself. The world’s richest man is turning a digital public square into a personal megaphone. That is not only his problem. It is a problem for Western societies.

Five theses

First: Musk’s understanding of free speech is distorted. Deliberately amplifying conspiracy theories, as he did in the case of the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, does not liberate debate – it shifts its centre of gravity. Second: democracy needs open spaces for public argument, but not algorithmically stoked outrage machines. Twitter was imperfect before Musk. Under him it will get worse.

The economic problem

Third: Musk’s business model is unclear. Forty-four billion dollars for a platform that is losing its traditional advertising business because brands refuse to appear next to hate speech. Fourth: as media organisations leave, Twitter loses its function as a fast, reliable news source. What remains is a smaller, louder, more toxic network. The example of Telegram shows where that path leads.

What must happen now

Fifth: platform regulation is not a luxury but a necessity. The EU’s Digital Services Act is a start, but only a start. The United States has no comparable framework. A historical experiment is now running: can a single billionaire take over a global communications infrastructure and reshape it at will? The answer should not rest in Musk’s hands alone. And Mastodon, Bluesky and other alternatives show that there is another way.

I wrote this essay together with Sven Prange for Handelsblatt.