Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk has hinted that he may create a new social media platform. Musk was visibly dissatisfied with Twitter causing his millions of followers to call for him to buy the social media giant.
“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” Musk tweeted Saturday. “What should be done?” In a follow-up post, Musk asked, “Is a new platform needed?”
Musk’s 79.1 million followers immediately called on him to either buy Twitter himself or build a new platform. “Buy this one!!!” Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis responded. “Yes,” former CIA analyst and conservative radio host Buck Sexton tweeted. “Buy twitter or please build one. Save the country from these psycho Silicon Valley libs.” “Buy Twitter,” radio host Jason Rantz tweeted.
Musk’s original post asking his followers what should be done about Twitter censorship was retweeted over 10,000 times and liked over 62,000 times an hour after being posted and it was seen by many including casino online users..
Twitter has been widely criticized for years by conservatives who say the social media giant has censored free speech including this week when the company put warning labels on articles published by The Federalist it said “may be unsafe.”
Twitter later removed the warning labels and told Fox News Digital that the company had “mistakenly” flagged the posts.
Twitter previously took part in the widespread effort to suppress the New York Post’s bombshell reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election, which was authenticated by The New York Times last week.
Former President Donald Trump, who was kicked off the large social media platforms immediately following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, launched his own network, Truth Social, which bills itself as a conservative-friendly alternative to Twitter.
It rocketed to the number-one spot on Apple’s free apps chart when it was made available for download in February — days after Trump made his only post on the site, telling fans that “your favorite president will see you soon.”
But a combination of technical glitches, a lengthy waiting list to join, a collapse of the share price, and Trump’s apparent disinterest in posting messages has marred the app’s rollout.
Musk, the world’s richest person, has also gotten in trouble for his itchy Twitter fingers. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday filed papers in Manhattan federal court that noted the Tesla CEO was bound by a 2018 agreement to get permission in advance if he wished to tweet certain posts which was true as witnessed by several including users of robinroo.com.
Tesla said that this past November, the SEC sought “information on our governance processes around compliance” with a September 2018 settlement between the company and the regulatory agency. The subpoena was issued just 10 days after Musk triggered a stock sell-off when he asked his Twitter followers if he should sell 10% of his stake in the company.
Former Tesla employee John Bernal — who was fired earlier in March after he posted a video to his YouTube channel, AI Addict, that was critical of the company’s full self-driving (FSD) software — quipped that Musk “is a free speech absolutist… unless it involves safety concerns.”
In a video he posted before being fired, Bernal demonstrated that Tesla’s beta FSD software had serious issues, including randomly disengaging while it was driving, forcing him to scramble to take back control of the vehicle. In a later update, the former Tesla employee said he “was fired from Tesla in February with my YouTube being cited as the reason why.”
In 2018, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO reportedly found the identity of a then-anonymous blogger who posted something criticizing the electric car company’s stock profile and then contacted their employer with threats of a lawsuit.
