by Jonathan Turley
Twitter’s board of directors gathered this week to sign what sounds like a suicide pact. It unanimously voted to swallow a “poison pill” to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares, rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company.
The move is one way to fend off hostile takeovers, but what is different in this case is the added source of the hostility: Twitter and many liberals are apoplectic over Musk’s call for free speech protections on the site.
Company boards have a fiduciary duty to do what is best for shareholders, which usually is measured in share values. Twitter has long done the opposite. It has virtually written off many conservatives — and a large portion of its prospective market — with years of arbitrary censorship of dissenting views on everything from gender identity to global warming, election fraud and the pandemic. Most recently, Twitter suspended a group, LibsofTikTok, for “hateful conduct.” The conduct? Reposting what liberals have said about themselves.
The company seemingly has written off free speech, too. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”
Not surprisingly, selling censorship is not a big hit with most consumers, particularly from a communications or social media company. The actions of Twitter’s management have led to roller-coastering share values. While Twitter once reached a high of about $73 a share, it is currently around $45. (Musk was offering $54.20 a share, representing a 54 percent premium over the share price the day before he invested in the company.)
Notably, Musk would not trigger the poison pill if he stays below 15 percent ownership of the company. He could push his present stake up to 14.9 percent, and then negotiate with other shareholders to take greater control.
Another problem is that Twitter long sought a private buyer under former CEO Jack Dorsey. If Musk increases his bid closer to $60, the board could face liability in putting its interests ahead of the company’s shareholders.
Putting aside the magical share number, Musk is right that the company’s potential has been constrained by its woke management. For social media companies, free speech is not only ethically but economically beneficial — because the censorship model only works if you have an effective monopoly in which customers have no other choice. That is how Henry Ford could tell customers, back when he controlled car-making, that they could have any color of Model-T “as long as it’s black.”
Of course, the Model-T’s color was not a critical part of the product. On the other hand, Twitter is a communications company selling censorship — and opposing free speech as a social media company is a little like Ford opposing cars.
The public could be moving beyond Twitter’s Model-T philosophy, however, with many people looking for access to an open, free forum for discussions.
Censorship — or “content modification,” as used in polite company — is not value-maximizing for Twitter, but it is status-enhancing for executives like Agrawal. It does not matter that consumers of his product want less censorship; the company has become captive to its executives’ agendas.
Twitter is not alone in pursuing such self-defeating values. Many in the mainstream media and many on the left have become some of the loudest advocates for corporate censorship. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, for example, declared: “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” MSNBC’s Katy Tur warned that reintroducing free speech values on Twitter could produce “massive, life- and globe-altering consequences for just letting people run wild on the thing.”
Columnist and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian in explaining why freedom is tyranny. Reich dismissed calls for free speech and warned that censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.” He then delivered a line that would make Big Brother blush: “That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”
The problem comes when you sell fear for too long and at too high a price. Recently, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) agreed with MSNBC analyst John Heilemann that Democrats have to “scare the crap out of [voters] and get them to come out.”
That line is not selling any better for the media than it is for social media, however. Trust in the media is at a record low, with only 7 percent expressing great trust in what is being reported. The United States ranks last in media trust among 46 nations.
Just as the public does not want social media companies to control their views, they do not want the media to shape their news.
The poison pill is a double-edged sword, at least.
On one hand it screws the shareholders who can sue because the board of directors has a feduciary responsability to make them money, not lose money on purpose.
On another hand Twitter’s board has exposed the company’s hatred of freedom of speech to the entire world, and that can’t be good in the long run.
Twitter also makes Elon Musk look like one of the brightest African Americans on earth.
So, it’s all good for Elon, all bad for Twitter.
Share holders can sue until they are blue in the face; the left will keep Twitter censored until after the 2022 election and possibly until the 2024 election. Free speech to them is like sunlight to a vampire.
As long as twitter can keep their platform out of the control of anyone who is guided by free speech, they will stop at nothing including invoking bidens criminal regime.
Half the nation doesn’t believe anything it is told by those in authority and the other half revels in its reckless abuse of authority….
So they come right out and say it. Out loud. Twitter doesn’t care about the 1st Amendment or anyone’s right to just express a thought; they are in the protecting leftist ideology business. That doesn’t pay as well as being fair and, dare I use a leftist term, equitable to everyone, but the left can’t afford free speech.
Even the citizens of the Soviet Union knew they were getting censored news that lied to them, and they hated it. Leftist lemmings in the US WANT to have the bad news about their ideology suppressed and to be lied to. They are such cowards and so dependent on the liars that they cannot face the truth. So, they ENCOURAGE censorship.
Though these crybaby cowards are in a minority, the big-money elitist controllers won’t entertain the horrible idea of free speech. Goddamn, how much more clear can these totalitarian fascists make it?
It wasn’t so long ago everyone loved Musk when he shipped hardware for his Starlink system to Ukraine. Now he’s his using his wealth in an effort to support free speech and the left hates him. Fickle bunch these leftists. He’s kicking in the door of their clubhouse and they hate him for it. I’d bet he knew the reaction he would get from the left and did it anyway. Good for him.
I’m ok with both of those efforts by Musk. I have never used twitter and have no plans to change that no matter the outcome.