Don’t Put All Your Eggs in Elon Musk.

Twitter may be back on a better track, but we must maintain our alternatives.

One of the lessons the free speech concerned must learn from the Musk/Twitter chronicles is just how quickly the game can change.

It was less than a month back that Musk was mooting a new social media platform, before amassing a 9.7 percent stake in Twitter in early April. By mid month, he was offering to buy the entire company. Having rebuked his first offer, the tech titan caved in fewer than two weeks.

That’s a pretty tidy timeline. But it should serve as a warning about how quickly these things can flip. The political left is learning this right now. MSNBC’s Ari Melber is currently kvetching over Elon’s ownership, telling his audience:

“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself, you don’t even have to be transparent, you could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of it nominees.”

Mary Margaret Olohan @MaryMargOlohan

“You could secretly ban one party’s candidate…secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until AFTER the election.”

Yes, Ari. That’s what has been happening to conservatives and anti-establishment accounts for years now. Welcome to our world.

And ‘our world’ must remain vigilant: against a reversal of yesterday’s free speech victory, or across a number of other platforms we rely use. You also absolutely know (because they’ve said as much) that the entrenched political apparatus in Washington, D.C. intends to legislate and/or regulate in order to limit the free speech platform Musk has in mind.

Furthermore, there is no telling what Musk – a man who has attended a number of Chinese Communist-backed artificial intelligence conferences in recent years – will do next. In fact, after writing this article I found an applicable Musk quote about eggs and baskets:

He is now in control of some of our eggs. Our archives, our direct messages, our 3am typographical errors. Let’s take his implied advice, and not placed all our expectations in something we do not control.

And it’s easy to slip into the mindset that since Twitter is obviously such an important utility for public discourse, Musk owes us all something. And while we’re all grateful for and hopeful about his recent moves, it’d be foolhardy to relinquish the ground we’ve made on other platforms.

As a result of long-standing censorship, conservatives have built a number of companies – some with more efficacy than others – which deserve our support despite Twitter’s potential turn towards freedom.

GETTR, in my opinion, is best of these. I speak as a user, and as a publisher. GETTR not only has more daily active users than its competitors, but for me, I can see in real time when hyperlinks to my articles result in referral traffic. GETTR provides more of this than the likes of Parler, Truth Social, and Gab.

And that’s not an attack on any of the other platforms, either. I continue to use Truth and Gab, and they are just as important in the grand scheme of preparedness and speech. I won’t use Parler, for a multitude of reasons, but mostly because the original premise of the company (not selling or marketing user data) was tossed out when the firm was taken over by people far less interested in speech than they are their own bottom line.

All I now get from that company is solicitations for me to buy some skin cream, or some dodgy NFT.

Ironically, Parler’s case study could be the warning we need about Twitter’s future. But I won’t digress into the hypothetical too far. I don’t want to take anything away from this moment. At all. It’s big. There are plenty of reasons to be hopeful, and the past 24 hours have underscored the meaning behind the great new Bob cartoon from last week.

Bob Moran @bobscartoons

But we must remain on our guard, and we must not abandon the alternative platforms that have been built in recent years. We’re likely to regret it if we do.