Even before Elon Musk became Twitter's largest shareholder or launched his now-successful hostile takeover of the social media company, he shared a lot of ideas for what the platform could do better. Since Twitter's board accepted his offer to buy the company and take it private, calls for him to take action have only increased. Some are good, some aren't so good.
In the former category are the recommendations from civil rights attorney and CEO of the Center for American Liberty Harmeet Dhillon, who's also the RNC Committeewoman from California. (And, in the spirit of transparency, the lawyer who represented my former employer YAF in its successful First Amendment lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley.)
In a Wednesday evening interview with Tucker Carlson, she noted that "Elon Musk has in his hands one of the most important, perhaps the most important, free speech vehicles in the world right now" and with it, "an opportunity to change the discourse in this country for the better."
1) Move Twitter out of San Francisco and out of California altogether.
"One of the big problems in these big tech companies has been how they are overwhelmingly left-wing," Dhillon reiterated. "That is what you see in the bias in how these companies moderate speech and content." Instead of California, Dhillon suggested Musk move it to Florida or Texas — where Musk's other companies have established a presence. Moving Twitter from the ultra-liberal Bay Area to "any place in America outside California," Dhillon said, "would be a huge improvement."
2) Don't fire employees.
"I've seen calls to fire employees — I wouldn't do that," Dhillon said. "I think that's extreme and has liability issues, but I think you can ask people to reapply for the position they want in the company and then see if they're willing to go along with some of these new policies that I'm talking about," she explained.
3) Reinstate banned users.
Dhillon knows better than most the lengths to which Twitter has gone to crush free expression on its platform in the past in her work with the Center for American Liberty representing a number of banned users including Rogan O’Handley aka "DC Draino," and "meme meisters" — as Dhillon called them — such as "Carpe Donktum" along with Meghan Murphy, a radical Canadian feminist who was kicked off of Twitter for so-called "misgendering."
"All of these people, I think bringing them back on would actually increase popularity and traffic on Twitter," Dhillon added, "which is what a business should want."
4) Be honest and transparent.
Saying it's "something very simple that we learn as children," Dhillon pointed to transparency as something "that has been tremendously lacking on Twitter."
"Twitter has lied about how it has put its finger on the scale about election interference until after the fact," she said of instances such as its ban on The New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop from hell. "Twitter is not transparent about its policies, its algorithms. Twitter is not transparent about how people are removed from the platform," Dhillon noted. "And Twitter is not transparent, frankly, about who its users are. Elon Musk has talked about removing the bots from Twitter, I think that would tremendously improve the user experience," she said.
"There are a lot of complicated issues here," Dhillon said of Musk's hostile takeover of Twitter set to make the platform freer. "I'm sure he's getting advice from all over the place and of course I'm suing Twitter, so that is certainly a factor in what I have to say here," she added before issuing one last piece of advice to Musk.
5) Keep fighting for free speech.
"Continue to strike that blow for free speech that he's been doing on Twitter for the last few days," Dhillon cheered before warning "the United States Government is coming for Elon Musk — they're coming with today's announcement of this disinformation panel that they're going to have to examine so-called disinformation governance," she said. "That is really the government trying to impose the censorship that Elon Musk is saying is no longer going to exist on Twitter."
"We all need to stand together for that and have an open and fresh conversations," Dhillon encouraged.
Welcome back to #twitter @TuckerCarlson and thank you for having me on tonight to discuss my suggested tips for @elonmusk to improve Twitter. Hopefully he takes heed! pic.twitter.com/Hz9NuuUUxZ
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) April 28, 2022
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