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No, You’re Not Losing Your Free Speech — Even If It Has Limits

Social media needs to be regulated. Right now, users are the last line of defense, and it’s not working.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
6 min readMay 5, 2022
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

So, Elon Musk wants Twitter. But not to improve it and make it safer. Not to make it something other than a platform that facilitates for people to fight with others around the world and send death threats to people they’ve never met.

No, he wants “free speech.

As if speech on Twitter wasn’t already quite free.

Why are people so outraged about Elon Musk wanting to just improve Twitter and guarantee free speech? Maybe because that’s probably not his goal, and it doesn’t look like Musk actually knows what he’s talking about.

Many smarter brains than mine have already done a great job at pointing out instances in which Elon Musk has shown he’s actually not a proponent of free speech when it’s against him or his companies, so I don’t think I need to get into it.

Twitter is also far from being a public square where every citizen participates. It’s still a much smaller platform than Facebook or Instagram with its approximately 300 million users, although people in tech, journalism and politics often seem to forget about this. It’s an opinion…

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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