Elon Musk has long claimed he wants Twitter to be a digital town square open to debate from all aspects of the political spectrum.
“For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” the billionaire tweeted in April last year, shortly after he made his bid to buy the company.
But lately, Musk has been upsetting one side a lot more than the other. He has been courting some of the most powerful figures in conservative politics to make Twitter their platform of choice, while angering liberals by engaging with conspiracy theories and culture-war-baiting rhetoric.
The latest development came on Tuesday when Musk confirmed that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will launch his presidential bid on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday at 6 pm ET, in a special conversation with Musk. It’s a first for a presidential candidate to announce their bid for presidency on a social media network, and it’s particularly notable that Musk, the company’s owner, is throwing his star power and massive following behind the effort. The news came the same day the Daily Wire, a conservative media outlet that hosts shows by popular right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, said it would be streaming its shows for free on Twitter. And just two weeks prior, recently fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he’s producing a new show that will run on Twitter — another major right-wing media coup for the platform.
While Musk has been busy promoting right-wing powerhouses on Twitter, he hasn’t made any similar public partnerships with liberal politicians, left-leaning or even neutral media outlets. His cozying up to the right seems to be alienating some liberal users. A recent Pew study shows that Twitter users who identify as Democrats were almost 10 percent more likely to say they would stop using the platform in a year (the partisan gap was even greater with Democratic women than men). And…
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