When Twitter started overtly censoring conservatives a few years ago I tried to break my addiction to the platform. Lefties said “if you don’t like Twitter, sta

When Twitter started overtly censoring conservatives a few years ago I tried to break my addiction to the platform. Lefties said “if you don’t like Twitter, start your own platform.” Gab and Parler popped up. Predictably, they picked up some unpleasant fringe elements of the Right (just as Twitter hosts unpleasant far-Left accounts). And then the Left went on the attack against Gab, Parler etc, cancel culture activism against advertisers, cloud hosting, payments, app store listings etc. Aside from the obvious problem of Twitter’s network effect, it seemed futile for right-of-centre people to create their own networks due to insidious attacks on those networks by the Left. I had high hopes for decentralised social networks like Mastadon — in principle — but the user experience was 5-10 years behind Twitter, and the Mastadon founder also had some questionable leftwing/pro-censorship ideas too. I didn’t spend long there before begrudgingly returning to Twitter. I asked my wife to password-protect app limits on my iPhone to prevent me spending more than half an hour per day on Twitter. Why waste my time in a place where people with my political leanings are systematically suppressed? Then Elon came along and I feel there are brighter days ahead. He wants to make the far left and far right equally unhappy. And he wants the limits of free speech to be dictated by law (created by democratically elected governments) rather than by opaque private companies with inevitable corporate/political bias. Good luck to him.