Elon Musk’s plan to reinstate Trump on Twitter would just reignite a race to the bottom

Ads account for 90% of Twitter’s revenue, and now that advertisers know exactly what Twitter would look like under Elon Musk’s leadership — they should be terrified

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

In an interview earlier today, Elon Musk said he would reverse Twitter’s ban on Donald Trump, calling the ban a “morally bad decision.”

In reaction to the report, Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, issued the following statement:

We said this was coming. Elon Musk would open the floodgates of hate and disinformation on Twitter — and he’d start by letting Donald Trump back on Twitter on day one.

It won’t just be Trump that Musk will restore. There are scores of people, from Alex Jones to Roger Stone to active white nationalists, who will also have their accounts restored.

The only thing worse than Twitter replatforming the likes of Donald Trump and Alex Jones — as well as reversing course in dealing with disinformation and extremists — is the perverse pressure it’ll create on other major social media platforms, including Facebook, to let them back on as well, effectively igniting a race to the bottom.

This isn’t about speech — this is about ideology. Whether Elon Musk is a fully red-pilled right-wing radical or just someone very interested in enabling right-wing extremists, the result is the same: he’ll use Twitter and its platform to radicalize others; he’s said as much himself.

Ads account for 90% of Twitter’s revenue, and now that advertisers know exactly what Twitter would look like under Elon Musk’s leadership — they should be terrified. Musk’s changes would be bad for their brands, and advertisers are prepared to pull their investments from Twitter to protect themselves.

Now that it's all out in the open — it's up to Elon Musk’s financial backers, and Tesla shareholders, if they want to bear the costs for Musk’s radical political beliefs.