Godspeed to Elon Musk

Well, it’s actually happened. Elon Musk has bought Twitter. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy,” Musk said in a statement yesterday afternoon, “and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” We wish him well in his attempt to make that “digital town square” more open, less arbitrary, and better suited to the potential of the Web.

Almost to a man, critics of the purchase have begun warning about the “Wild West” that will result if Musk gets his way. But, as ever, their assumptions betray them. Nowhere has Musk said that Twitter will be entirely devoid of moderation. What he seems to be saying instead — what Twitter’s critics have demanded — is an end to the caprice. It is, of course, entirely possible for Twitter to construct a set of neutrally applicable rules that require people of all political viewpoints to engage with each other in a civil way. The problem has been that, in practice at least, Twitter’s rules were achieving no such thing and that, over time, users had noticed.

Yesterday’s news should remind Americans that where there is a dynamic market economy, there will always be rapid change. Six months ago, those griping about the way in which Twitter was being run did not see this coming. Nobody did. The talk was about the government, and Section 230, and whether, if you squint a little, Twitter could be forced to look like a phone company. But where there is demand, there will eventually be supply, and, by buying Twitter from its previous owners, Musk has vowed to alter that supply and bring it into line with the preference of a large share of consumers. In business, at least, there are many second acts in American life.