The less brand safe the platform becomes, the less big corps will want to be associated with it or maintain a presence there.
He might be good for shareholders, but it’s not because of “free speech”.
I wouldn't take anything too seriously from [Project Veritas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas) who have an ongoing issues of distorting, misrepresenting and the like - the ACORN case being most obvious.
"Elon doing this is now massive peer pressure in the opposite direction."
What is the opposite direction? Why is that better/good? I honestly don't know what the opposite of "woke" is, because "woke" is used as a reactive response. It's whatever it needs to be to attack.
This all seems part of a wider "culture war". Like many wars it's actually hard to know what underlies it.
"Libertarian" style free speech is widely available. Unfortunately it seems to just degenerate into trolling and the worst of human behavior. (say like 4chan/8chan etc).
If you want "Authoritarian Conservative" you can go to Truth Social or "r/conservative" on reddit.
"this is likely great news for proponents of free speech"
Free speech protects citizens from the government. If twitter doesn't want Nazis (or whatever) on it's service then it can do that. It is not a free speech issue.
That is the current situation in the west with social media and the woke religion.
Project veritas exposed a lot of this by having a journalist match Twitter engineers on tinder, get invited to their holiday party, and secretly record them admitting to targeting conservative accounts.
Besides now being the biggest shareholder, Elon also has a lot of Twitter followers. He threatened to make a new platform, but did this instead.
The new CEO is a former SWE and a more typical SV guy. I don’t think he’s especially woke but he’s also down to bow to peer pressure. Elon doing this is now massive peer pressure in the opposite direction.
Given how often Bay Area engineeers forget their own bubbles and biases and accuse dissenting views of being “intolerant”, this is likely great news for proponents of free speech and Twitter shareholders.