Social media giant Twitter has been losing petulant, anti-free speech, left-wing followers while gaining exultant conservative accounts in the wake of billionaire Elon Musk’s recent buyout.
The hashtag #LeaveTwitter began to trend on the platform after the news of Musk’s $44 billion buyout broke. Former President Barack Obama — the most popular account on the platform with more than 131 million followers — for example, lost 300,000 followers nearly overnight. Pop star Katy Perry — the third most popular account on Twitter with 108 million followers — lost 200,000 followers.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), by contrast, whose personal account was permanently banned earlier this year, gained nearly 100,000 to her official congressional account in just 24 hours.
On Monday, Musk tweeted the following statement:
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” said Mr. Musk. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”