Just over two weeks ago, free speech seemed to be America’s most pressing issue. At the end of April, Elon Musk's $44 billion bid to buy Twitter was accepted, and all sides of the political spectrum were consumed by what this meant for the discourse.
Musk is sympathetic to right-wing criticisms of Twitter as biased against conservatives (claims that are factually untrue) and has vowed to make Twitter a “platform for free speech around the world” (of course, Musk recently stated that, under his leadership, tweets deemed “wrong and bad” could “be either deleted or made invisible,” so who knows).
This issue has more or less faded from the news cycle, but a vision of lives destroyed for the wrong expression isn’t some dystopic future.
As the recent arrests of Gunna and Young Thug prove, it’s happening right now. The 56-count indictment was handed down on May 9.
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