Implications of a Twitter takeover

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter. So far he's willing to pay $50 plus doobies for each share he needs to turn the public company private. Technically, his offer is $54.20 per share, with the $4.20 of specificity widely interpreted as reflecting the marijuana slang he likes to deploy. He says it's his "best and final" offer, but the Twitter board of directors is less than thrilled, and Musk has hinted that he'll go directly to shareholders. Hostile takeover attempts are always good for that kind of intrigue, but this one has interest beyond business.

Why is Musk high on gaining accountability for a company with a blue bird logo and black-eye reputation, a history of net losses, and billions of socially precarious tweets?

• "Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it." (Musk, in a letter to Twitter's chairman, with echoes of "I alone can fix it.")

• "He's bored." (Teenage son of New York Times pundit and podcaster Kara Swisher. But "never boring," adds Swisher, in a column titled "Elon Musk Knows Exactly What He's Doing.")

• "If in doubt, let the speech … exist." (Musk again, at a TED conference last week. He believes that "Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square" — though just a small slice of the population actively posts there — and that it has failed to inclusively accommodate the world's assortment of cogent, clever and crazy.)

We'd guess that each bullet point applies, though he seems most invested in the third.

Musk is an ideas guy who brings his thoughts to fruition. He's done so at Tesla and SpaceX. He had a hand in the development of PayPal. He's willing — and we say this with admiration — to get things wrong on the first few tries for the sake of invention. He also likes — this we present as a double-edged sword — to flout norms, and he has his personal axes to grind.

If he succeeds in his bid for Twitter, expect the pendulum to swing back on the gatekeeping changes the company has made in the last few years, though he probably wouldn't abandon them altogether. It would be a continuing exploration of where users' freedom to swing their metaphorical fists meets the public interest's metaphorical nose. This is not a bad thing to keep recalibrating.

But where would it leave those of us who believe, with few exceptions, in forbidding government restriction of speech per the First Amendment, and who acknowledge the value of maintaining the spirit of free expression even in private forums where constitutionality is not at issue, but who realize that comforting thoughts about the flow of information have not held up so well in the age of instant communication?

Consider the notion that the best ideas rise to the top. Maybe they do, but snark and oversimplification surface sooner. And the suds of superiority overflow.

Consider the idiom that "truth will out." That's Shakespearean language, which is why it seems like words are missing, eloquently — and even in its context (a case of concealed identity in "The Merchant of Venice") it is acknowledged that this may come "at the length." When it finally arrives, will the deluded much care, and will they already have acted irrevocably on falsehoods?

And then there's incitement. While social media adds value by telling people when and where they can engage in legitimate civic participation or even protest, and while it can gather them in a hurry when warranted, that very power invites manipulation and mob mentality. Recent years have produced painful examples.

It is for this last reason especially that the Star Tribune Editorial Board has supported actions by the prominent social-media companies to better police their platforms. If people don't like that, the internet offers a bounty of alternatives and endless churn. Content providers passing along the words of others have a lot of leeway, since the portion of the U.S. Code known as Section 230 relieves them of liability to a significant degree. True freedom may depend on dispersion.

A final thought: The language of this editorial aims to transcend the culture's obvious divisions, though at some risk of false equivalence. Our disappointment with the internet age is not that more people are trying to promote their ideas but that so many promote their ideas without putting in the effort to understand the depth and breadth of implications, and without being open to at least considering other viewpoints. Yet even an assessment like that is unlikely to escape accusations of bias.

And so the battle for freedom of expression goes on eternally.