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Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
Photo: Aly Song / REUTERS
The announcement by billionaire Elon Musk that he did not want to take over the online network Twitter after all brought relief to left-wing activists in the United States on Saturday.
Bridget Todd from the organization UltraViolet spoke of good news for "women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community".
Twitter led by Musk would have led to a “tide of hatred and baseless conspiracy theories”.
Nicole Gill of Accountable Tech called the failed takeover of Twitter Musk's "chaotic crusade."
She told the Washington Post: "Our information ecosystem, our security and our democracy must not be at the mercy of rampant billionaires."
Musk and Twitter agreed in April that the celebrated and controversial entrepreneur would take over the online platform for $44 billion.
The Tesla founder sees himself as an advocate of freedom of expression and had announced that he would give the greatest possible legal freedom to expression on Twitter in the future.
However, he dropped the purchase agreement on Friday.
In particular, representatives of the political right in the USA, whose ex-President Donald Trump had been excluded from the platform because of controversial statements on Twitter, had hoped for an end to what they perceive as politically motivated censorship.
"The party's really over here," lamented right-wing author and presenter Dave Rubin.
"Censorship" on Twitter will now "increase tenfold," predicted Trump's son Donald Trump Junior.
Trump himself saw Musk's failed Twitter takeover as confirmation of the future success of his own online platform, Truth Social.
"The Twitter deal is dead, long live the truth," Trump wrote in capital letters on his own network.
The launch of Truth Social was initially overshadowed by technical difficulties.
mgo/AFP
