The Washington Post, which daily assures us that “democracy dies in darkness,” queues up the dark dystopias that progressives imagine that Musk will unleash on us when everyone can speak and engage freely. As in, y’know … democracy:

While fewer than 1 in 4 U.S. adults say they use Twitter, the service is a top platform for powerful figures in business and politics, as well as activists, giving it an outsize role in triggering social movements and influencing governments. More than rival social platforms, it has a design that encourages public debates and conversations from a broad spectrum of political viewpoints, shaping perceptions about news events in real time.

A transformed Twitter could alter the very nature of the platform in society, insiders and observers say, by tilting it in a rightward direction and making it less palatable for some of the figures who have made the site so influential in the first place. This could happen just weeks before the U.S. midterm elections and at a moment when Twitter is party to a Supreme Court case that could shape the future of online speech.

“If you want to know what Twitter will look like without moderation, look at Gab, Parler or Truth Social. Hate is rampant. Disinformation thrives. That’s the future of this platform,” said Brianna Wu, an advocate and former game developer who was targeted with misogynist threats on Twitter by the GamerGate movement.

Even worse, the employees at Twitter who had previously shaped the debate and discussion to their liking might not stick around in a new Musk regime. They are already threatening to walk out, which might make speech even more free even sooner than expected. The Post laments that the “higher calling” of controlling the debate to which they hew might disappear:

Many employees think of Twitter as a higher calling as much as it is a job and have felt betrayed by executives who they believed prioritized shareholder earnings over what’s best for the service.

“There’s a difference between what the board wants and what employees think is best,” Brandon Borrman, the company’s former communications chief, said in an interview. “People forget that most people that work at Twitter do so because they believe in the company’s mission — and they want to protect it from anybody. Whether they can do that remains to be seen.”

The New York Times’ Kevin Roose predicts an employee revolt as well, while making clear their ideological agenda. To be fair, Roose approaches this with a pass-the-popcorn neutral vibe, but he’s also warning about Musk’s ability to control the outcome of the 2024 election by, er, exercising a lot less control over the debate:

Twitter, more so than other social media platforms, has a vocally progressive work force and many employees who are deeply invested in the company’s mission of promoting “healthy conversation.” Those employees may believe — for good reason! — that under Mr. Musk’s leadership, Twitter will abandon many of the projects they care about in areas like trust and safety. Or they may simply not want to deal with the drama and tumult of a Musk regime, and start looking for jobs elsewhere. …

Mr. Musk, who styles himself a centrist but often crusades against the “woke left,” has made no secret of his plans to make Twitter a friendlier platform for right-wing voices. He has expressed support for The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site whose Twitter account was suspended after it published a transphobic humor piece about a Biden administration official. And Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal Twitter account was suspended this year for repeatedly sharing misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, has urged Mr. Musk to reinstate her along with other right-wing commentators, including Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars.

Along with one-off reversals of high-profile bans, I’d also expect that Mr. Musk would tear up Twitter’s existing rules and rewrite new ones, and that he might dismantle Twitter’s content-policy and trust-and-safety teams, which are responsible for enforcing the platform’s rules as they currently exist. (That is, if those teams don’t quit en masse first.) …

The 2024 election, though, will be a different story. By then, if the deal is consummated, Mr. Musk will have been able to more fully mold Twitter in his own image. The platform could look radically different by then — more right-wing trolls, fewer guardrails against misinformation and extremism — or it could be largely the same. But Mr. Musk will be firmly in charge, and if Twitter still plays anywhere near the role in American political and media culture that it does today, he will emerge as a central, polarizing figure in the 2024 election cycle.

Uh, suuuure. That tends to overlook the enormous role that Twitter and Facebook played in the 2020 election, especially after their overt and not-so-overt manipulations of their platforms to kill off election-related stories and debate. The most infamous of these was the Big Tech-wide stamping out of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but newer testimony shows that these platforms were tamping down debate and limiting access to a wider range of issues in the lead-up to the presidential election.

Issues & Insights has a round-up of these revelations in its editorial this morning, and includes this:

The Foundation for Freedom Online has been pulling together information on these efforts, and found that the focus on attacking domestic speech accelerated in the run-up to the 2020 elections:

To create a ‘whole-of-society’ consensus on the censorship of political opinions online that were ‘casting doubt’ ahead of the 2020 election, DHS organized ‘disinformation’ conferences to bring together tech companies, civil society groups, and news media to all build consensus – with DHS prodding (which is meaningful: many partners receive government funds through grants or contracts, for fear government regulatory or retaliatory threats) – on expanding social media censorship policies.

John Solomon, the editor in chief of Just the News and one of the only reporters to cover these revelations, says that a consortium of four private groups worked with DHS and the State Department “to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election.”

If Twitter drops out of this “consortium,” it might lead to — heaven forfend — actual debate and engagement on a social media platform. It might bypass government attempts to censor and manipulate information by comparison to other platforms that still cooperate with that “consortium,” for instance. And the mainstream media would prefer to work in a government-controlled debate space rather than in a First Amendment environment, it seems.

Jonathan Turley nails it in his swipe at MSM “hyperventilation” over the sale of Twitter. He headlines his piece:

“Be Afraid, Be Actually Afraid”: Reporters Panic at the Thought of Twitter Restoring Free Speech Protections

Turley scoffs at the sense of proportion involved, too:

“Be afraid, be actually afraid.” Those words from former Politico Magazine editor Garrett M. Graff captures the hyperventilation in the media this week. No it is not Vladimir Putin’s threat of unleashing a nuclear war or the word that our national debt has reached a staggering $31 trillion. No, it is the news that Elon Musk may go forward with the purchase of Twitter and . . . [trigger warning] . . . free speech protections might be restored on the platform. The pearl-clutching of various media and academic figures shows how engrained the censorship culture has become in the United States. …

The one thing that we agree on is that this could be a historic moment and free speech could be returning to a major platform of social media. The company seemingly wrote off free speech years ago. 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.”

That, unfortunately, is exactly the same attitude that the mainstream media have about the First Amendment and open debate. And that is why many of those who value both cheered Musk’s buyout — not because we thought Musk was solid on those points, but that the status quo was so bad and manipulative that any change would be preferable.

Even if Musk ends up changing nothing at all — a distinct possibility — the exercise has been valuable enough already. The masks have dropped, in both Big Tech and in mainstream media, about their derision for free speech and open debate. They intend on using both to silence their political opposition. And the only solution to that is to create and support independent platforms that will never feel forced to collaborate with censors or kowtow to Big Tech elite.