The fight is on to censor Elon Musk’s Twitter

If Elon Musk truly intends to make Twitter a free-speech platform, he’s clearly got a fight on his hands. That was made abundantly clear by the collective meltdown among media and political elites that greeted the billionaire’s shock takeover of the platform last month. The vested interests in keeping Twitter a sanitised, censorious place are apparently considerable. And not only will Musk have the great and good, his own employees, our own Nadine Dorries and Joe Biden’s new ‘disinformation tsar’ to contend with, but potentially Twitter’s advertisers, too.

CNN reports that giant American brands, including Coca-Cola and Disney, are coming under pressure to boycott Twitter if Elon Musk makes good on his promises to roll back content-moderation policies and bring speech standards on the platform more or less in line with what the law allows. Twenty-six civil-society organisations have signed an open letter, calling on big brands to pressure Musk to at least maintain Twitter’s existing censorship regime – which would include keeping banned bogeymen like Donald Trump off the platform and continuing to limit what is deemed ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’.