Daily Verse | 1 Chronicles 17:20
“There is no one like you, O Lord, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears.”
Tuesday’s Reading: 1 Chronicles 21-24
Happy Tuesday and for once we have a story that offers not only a glimmer of hope for our conservative sensibilities, but also some entertainment bordering on not just amusement, but hilarity.
Twitter shares popped over 5% on Monday after the company’s board unanimously accepted Tesla CEO Elon Musk‘s $44 billion offer to take the social media giant private.
Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, the last trading day before Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in the company.
So Musk buys out stockholders, who get a premium on their shares, and will take the company private.
Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist,” has been critical of the platform and its chief executive Parag Agrawal’s approach to free speech.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Shareholders make money and Musk will make money, but the point of his takeover, he says, is that he sees Twitter as the “digital town square” where speech (opinions, fast takes, facts and news) needs the freedom to express itself without condition.
On the surface, that’s a good thing since Twitter is notorious for shutting down anything that goes against a Leftist narrative and for censoring a story (the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop) that should have had a measurable effect on the outcome of the 2020 election, i.e. 15 percent more votes for Trump.
Setting that aside, the best part is the meltdown happening with the Twitteratti and the Twitter-adjacent.
Those who are horrified that Musk now owns one of the most effective and popular means of mass communication in the world are worried that somehow, freedom of speech means that people on the fringe are going to get hurt.
Deborah Brown, whom Reuters describes as a “digital rights researcher and advocate” at Human Rights Watch, asserted: “Regardless of who owns Twitter, the company has human rights responsibilities to respect the rights of people around the world who rely on the platform. Changes to its policies, features, and algorithms, big and small, can have disproportionate and sometimes devastating impacts, including offline violence. Freedom of expression is not an absolute right, which is why Twitter needs to invest in efforts to keep its most vulnerable users safe on the platform.”
And who are these “most vulnerable users”?
But Michael Kleinman, director of technology and human rights at Amnesty International USA, sees trouble ahead: “The last thing we need is a Twitter that willfully turns a blind eye to violent and abusive speech against users, particularly those most disproportionately impacted, including women, non-binary persons, and others.”
Ah. The usual suspects.
Listen, I support banning users who use the platform to intimidate, bully, or threaten the welfare or life of other users, online or off. The problem is that the Left defines “intimidate, bully, or threaten” in terms that favor only its viewpoint and that often include speech that is simply anything they don’t like.
As usual, the Right can meme.
Good times.
It remains to be seen how many Lefties leave Twitter because Musk is now boss. I think it’ll be hard for them because they’re like crack addicts and need their daily fix of dunking on the Right in 180-character units.
And if they don’t like it, they can go build their own site.