Will Threads tame Elon Musk’s Twitter?

We will need tighter regulation. We will need new laws and controls. And we will have to organise boycotts of advertisers to bring it into line. Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and started to try and make the liberal-left’s favourite mouthpiece slightly more balanced, not to mention slightly more profitable, there have been endless demands to stop the libertarian billionaire from changing anything about it.

Politicians such as the American democratic senator Amy Klobuchar have called for more content moderation and harsher punishment for spreading hate speech. Last October, the EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton taunted Twitter, saying ‘In Europe, the bird will fly by our European rules’.

But hold on. A better alternative has now emerged: competition. With the launch of Threads later this week by Mark Zuckerberg, consumers will be able to choose what kind of social media platform they prefer, and that is surely a lot better than the government deciding for them.