Jeff Childers again

Shocking most reporters who thought Musk’s offer to buy Twitter would be undermined or torpedoed or regulated into oblivion, the board of directors accepted Musk’s offer yesterday and, apart from some unlikely contingencies, Musk will become the new owner of the platform. Following the announcement, things on Twitter immediately started changing and the platform LIT UP.

The first change was news that the company had locked its software code down, so that disgruntled employees couldn’t sabotage anything by making stealth changes to the algorithms. Then throughout the afternoon, existing conservative users began to report their follower numbers jumping. Even though I’m just a small bird in the Twitter forest, mine increased by 10% within a few hours. Apparently Twitter had been suppressing the growth of my account; and if they’d flagged MY little account, it must have been extremely widespread.

By this morning, Twitter was ON FIRE; a whole bunch of long-banned accounts were newly restored. I first noticed Dr. Robert Malone’s announcement, “I’m back!,” quickly followed by “Are we not spelling it ??verm%ktin anymore?” Tucker Carlson popped back into my feed, along with LibsOfTikTok, Michael Caine, and lots of others.

On the other side, lefty twitter celebrities like David Hogg were reporting LOSING followers, which I’m guessing represents the ending of Twitter’s artificial promotion of those accounts with bots or fake followers. Other leftwing users were rage-quitting twitter, posting lengthy uncensored jeremiads about losing their free speech, if you can believe that. Conservatives started having a field day tweeting things that would’ve gotten them perma-banned the day before, like “vaccines cause many side effects including death,” and “J6 was not an insurrection.”

Folks, this is more pandemic blessings. Musk’s companies were shut down in California during the early pandemic, even though Tesla met the official state definition of an “essential service,” since it was an energy-related company. After an ugly spat with county officials, Musk moved his companies to Texas during the Great Migration last year. So, he knows how insane and wrong-headed the government covid overreach was.

Covid “misinformation” became the excuse for Twitter to crack down on speech on the platform. First, it was the posts and writers who questioned the “official” Covid narrative. Then it was vaccine information, particularly anything questioning whether the jabs were 100% safe and effective. Those government-approved filters then metastasized into political censorship, banning discussion of issues like Hunter Biden’s laptop or whether Lia Thomas was really a man, with those topics joining the ever-expanding definition of banned “misinformation.”

Unsurprisingly, Twitter’s stock lagged over the last year, which gave Musk an opening to buy the company at a significant discount. One of my good friends who runs an investment fund thinks the social media company was undervalued, pegging a fair market price for Twitter at $59 dollars per share (Musk bought at $54.20), and even up to $70 per share for a control premium.

Within hours of the announcement yesterday, Jen Psaki took the podium fretting darkly about threats to free speech on social media, concentration of social media power, and misinformation. She explained, “I’m not going comment on a specific transaction…[T]he President…has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause.”

Get ready.

Government regulation IS a potential problem for Twitter, but the government can’t regulate Twitter speech without also regulating Facebook, which remains a reliable government-controlled platform. So. We’ll see.