Ah yes, Twitter, the funny little blue bird app where you can get your account deleted for making a joke. Well, not anymore. Elon Musk has been planning to buy Twitter for 44 Billion dollars (the deal is currently on hold) and one of his main priorities was to ensure freedom of speech on the app.

We have seen prominent Republican figures get doxxed, like Donald Trump, Taylor Greene, Rand Paul, Katie Hopkins, all who got banned for reasons that would not violate our constitution’s freedom of speech. 

First, It might help to define what our free speech is in the United States, and what speech is protected under it. It is pretty much everything. Virtually all speech is protected, no matter how offensive or hateful it is, sayeth the 1st amendment. Hate speech in its original definition has been misconstrued today and people are calling anything that personally offends them hate speech, but there is a difference between hate speech and speech you hate. This is a good thing.

While speech may be offensive, we must risk being offensive to be able to think, and jailing or fining someone over something they said that someone took as hate speech (like Bill C16 in Canada) is not good for a society. America is the only country in the world with freedom of speech protected in the constitution.

Everywhere else, you can get jailed or fined for being either racist, not respecting sexuality, not respecting gender Identity, bad-mouthing the government, or various other reasons, but not here in the US. Simply having an opinion will not get you fined or jailed here. Which is good, because it might be quite scary for the government having that type of power to jail you because you said something. 

We have very few exceptions, and they are fraud, obscenity, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that will directly incite immediate illegal action, speech that violates intellectual property law, as well as slander, which is intentionally making false statements with malicious intent. These are all things that will cause direct harm to an individual, and are not a way of thinking, so we can say these things are not protected.

For example, speech that would be protected under the constitution would be “I do not like (group of people) because they are (adjectives) and I think they should not exist and or die.” However offensive it may be to you, it is still protected. Something NOT protected would be “I do not like (group of people) because (adjective) and someone should go and kill them all.” This is basically a death threat, and directly inciting violence against individuals. 

We have seen the former get conservatives banned off Twitter, for the risk that it may be offensive. Biggest example would be Trump. The last tweet Trump made before he got banned was “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

Trump tweeted Friday at 9:46 a.m. He then tweeted at 10:44 a.m.: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” From the same website, Twitter’s response to this before the Ban was “his message to supporters was ‘encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts’” 

Looking at Trump’s message, it is quite hard to see how that could have incited the capital riots. It does not violate our constitutional freedom of speech. However, Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has shown past support for the Democrat party. Perhaps there could be bias there. 

But, Elon Musk has bought Twitter now! And his main point is to bring free speech for all parties. The left has not taken this lightly, because they don’t want other opinions besides theirs to be heard, apparently.

From The Daily mail, “A quivering Washington Post columnist declared himself ‘frightened’ because Musk ‘seems to believe that on social media, anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.’” Basically censorship from ideas that are not their own

And oh boy, has some stuff happened. It really shows you how much of a bias there was when you look at all the new Numbers. Republican accounts have gained many followers, such as people like Marjorie Taylor Greene gaining 107,000 followers, Ron DeSantis gaining more than 211,000 followers, Lauren Boebert gaining 102,000 followers, Matt Gaetz gaining 62,000 followers.

All prominent Republicans gained many followers. And that’s not all. Many democrat accounts are losing followers. You have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez losing 38,000 followers, Kamala Harris has lost 28,000, Jen Psaki who has lost 9,600 followers, and even Obama, the most followed Twitter account, has lost more than 300,000 followers. 

There was a trend going on about liberals leaving Twitter because god knows they can’t stand hearing about a difference of opinion, but it is a wee bit suspicious that Musk was trying to get rid of Bot and spam accounts, and suddenly these people lose mass amounts of followers. Even more suspicious now that it has been found out that half of Joe Biden’s Twitter followers are fake. (More on that at Half of Joe Biden’s Twitter Followers are “fake”)

Hopefully, the inherent bias of Twitter will be less because of Musk, and we can all have an equal voice.