Mr Torba suggests an alternative route for Mr Musk.
This morning Elon Musk sent Twitter’s Board an offer to buy the entire company for $40B+. As I wrote last week, anything that explicitly has the aim of bringing more free speech to the internet for more people is a good thing.
Twitter has legacy problems that Gab doesn’t. They are fully dependent on third-party infrastructure. We are not. We “built our own,” everything. Hosting, email services, analytics tools, ecommerce, payment processing, all of it. We built it all.
You also have to consider that bringing free speech to Twitter isn’t as simple as buying it. Apple and Google do not allow free speech, so if you stop the censorship they will kick Twitter from both app stores. We already solved that problem and overcame it.
Twitter operates in countries where mass censorship is required by law. They have offices in these countries. They have no choice but to comply with the censorship demands of those countries or risk being shut down, fines, etc.
We understand this very well and have dealt with it, telling those countries to get lost.
Then there is the problem of Twitter’s community itself. It skews massively left and thus anti-free speech. If you allow free speech on Twitter again, those people are absolutely going to leave because their fragile worldview can’t handle the reality that free speech brings.
As a good friend pointed out rightfully to me this morning: “I highly doubt they will accept his offer. They would rather shares go to zero than hand over narrative control. If they do accept they will sabotage internally and to whatever degree he makes good changes Twitter will get the Gab treatment from the globohomo.”
In light of these truths, I’d like to offer Elon a counter offer to his very expensive and overpriced Twitter deal.
That’s from the Gab News email list I subscribe to, so no link, alas. Out of nothing more than force of habit I was gonna leave off there, just as I would with any article or blog post I was using as my jumping-off point. But since I’m quoting here from an email list that most of y’all probably ain’t on, it occurs to me that fair use is right out the window, liberating me to expand the excerpting so as not to leave any of my valued CF Lifers hanging like that.
Ladies (!) and germs, I give you The Rest Of The Story (/PaulHarveyvoice).
Elon,
I founded Gab in 2016 because I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning constitutional federal republic.However, since founding Gab I realized that in order to provide a free speech platform you must also have free speech internet infrastructure. Gab has since transformed from merely a social network into a free speech internet infrastructure company. We built our own servers, our own email services, our own payment processor, and so much more not because we wanted to, but because we had no choice if we were going to continue to exist.
What we are missing at the moment is an ISP. I fear that the next big leap of censorship is at the ISP level, with ISP’s blocking access to Gab.com. You solve that problem with Starlink. Together we can build infrastructure for a free speech internet.
I am willing to offer you a Board seat along with equity in the company in exchange for you selling your Twitter position and investing $2B into Gab. My offer is my best and final offer.
Gab has extraordinary potential. Let’s unlock it together.
Man, I’d giggle myself hoarse and dance around like a giddy schoolgirl if Musk jumped all over this excellent offer, but he probably won’t. Honestly, it reminds me a great deal of how puzzled I was as to why the hell Trump, back when he was Preznit and Twatter and Fakebook were dicking him around right and left, didn’t just tell Fuckerburg and Dorksnort to go piss up several ropes while watching him make the jump to Gab and Parler or one of the other options that were popping up all over the place at the time. DJT would easily have brought several million followers right along with him in the first ten minutes, thereby killing two birds with one stone: Bird #1) an internet home for our 1A right to freedom of expression would thus be secured, and Bird Numero Dos) Twatter and Fuckstickbook would at last have ha dsome legitimate, credible competition to fret their sorry asses some.
Goon squads update! And as if on cue, they come for him.
Elon Musk hit a nerve in Washington DC as the Biden-Harris regime scrambles to intimidate him following his announced plans to acquire Twitter and make it a private company. Reports are coming in that they’ve suddenly launched several investigations into his dealings, none of which seem to have anything to do with Twitter.
It is unclear what the Department of Justice wants with him, but one thing is very clear. The Biden-Harris regime desperately wants to take him down before he does something that hurts them such as buying Twitter and opening the door to free speech on what he has described as the “digital public square.”
Well, if Musk didn’t know he was in a war before, he damned well ought to now.
Yer doin’ it wrong update! I thought I was all done with this topic for tonight, until liberal dumbass Max Boot decided to put his oar in.
I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.
— Max Boot 🇺🇦 (@MaxBoot) April 14, 2022
Uh HUH. So according to this self-proclaimed Supergenius!!!™, the only chance for the survival of “democracy”—the US ain’t one, never was one, and hopefully never will be—is via more censorship and less free speech and debate? Forgive me and all, but does that seem like kind of a DIRECT FUCKING CONTRADICTION IN TERMS on its very face? Just admit it, shitlib poltroon: like all Lefty fascists, the only kind of “free speech” you support is your own, and that of the pig-ignorant, back-asswards fools who agree with you. In Leftard circles, dissent simply is NOT countenanced; you either endorse their opinions or you sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, that’s all.
There there, Maxie-boy, is hims all fwightened by the howwible, howwible “impact on society and politics” caused by the Bad Rich Man buying his pwecious widdle social-media playpen and then kicking his dainty ass out of it, in effect, just by making it a less comfortable place for weak sisters like you to strut, swagger, and bullyrag other kids in? Too bad, so sad. I hate it for ya, I really do.
Oh, and…nice hat, dickhead. Offsets the geek-goggles just right, methinks, especially with the way you’ve so laboriously positioned said fedora on your oblated head with just the right jaunty tilt. Taken with the saggy, baggy overcoat, you somewhat resemble what some effete urban hipster-douchebag thinks an old-school, rough-and-tumble, whiskey-swilling REAL journalist might look like. Of course, if said douchebag had ever encountered such a frightful thing in the flesh, he/she/it would have run away from the apparition as fast as his/her/its pudgy, dimpled legs would carry him/her/it, pissing his/her/its pants every step of the way just from the mind-bending terror of the thing.
Sorry, Waxey Maxie, but fearless correspondents like Ernie Pyle, Frank Bolden, Bill Mauldin, and Joe Galloway wouldn’t deign to piss in the mouth of a sniveling worm like you if your goddamned gums were on fire. How sad for you that your lifelong heroes would never be caught dead associating with you in public, no matter how extravagant a bribe you offered them to disgrace themselves so badly.
Fuckin’ punk-ass bitch.
Max Boot is a lefty idiot? I thought that was a troll account.
That right there is the problem with the world today, that we can’t tell the difference.
Aw yeah, Steve. Even worse, back in the old warblogging days he was generally considered to be a (gulp!) conservative, even claimed to be himself. Can’t remember exactly when it happened, but like Charles Johnson at LGF, Boot suddenly turned on a dime and went hard Left all the way. Same-same with Jennifer Rubin and several others, too. Might be that getting hired by the WaPo does something to a person, who knows. Or cares.