Sen. Marsha Blackburn on Elon Musk Buying Twitter: ‘Encouraging Day for Freedom of Speech’

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) CPAC 2021
Breitbart News
Allum Bokhari

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), a staunch conservative and vocal opponent of Big Tech censorship, said she was hopeful about the direction of Twitter following the company’s announcement that it would accept Elon Musk’s takeover bid.

“Today is an encouraging day for freedom of speech,” said Sen. Blackburn in a tweet. “I am hopeful that Elon Musk will help rein in Big Tech’s history of censoring users that have a different viewpoint.”

In a press release this afternoon, the Twitter board announced that it had accepted the bid of Elon Musk, a self-declared free speech absolutist, to buy out the company and take it private, at $54.20 per share.

The takeover bid from Musk, who has said he wants to overhaul content moderation to make it friendlier to free speech, led to spasms of outrage from progressive commentators on social media, as well as the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post.

As news that Twitter had accepted Musk’s offer broke, leftist-run tech outlet the Verge published an article explaining how to delete your Twitter account.

Sen. Blackburn, who joined Florida governor Ron DeSantis in praising Musk’s Twitter takeover, has long been a vocal critic of Silicon Valley censorship.

The Tennessee senator was herself the target of Big Tech censors during her campaign in 2018, when Facebook briefly took down one of her ads.

As the Biden administration sought to pressure tech companies to censor even more Americans, Sen. Blackburn called them out.

“The blatant actions by your administration to work with big tech companies to censor Americans’ free speech are shocking,” wrote Blackburn in a letter to the administration last July.

Sen. Blackburn has also opposed efforts by corporate media lobbyists to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), a bill that would allow the nation’s biggest media companies to join together in a cartel to collectively negotiate financial handouts and algorithmic prioritization from Silicon Valley.

The JCPA, said Blackburn, “will allow big tech to further consolidate power and make it even easier to censor conservative voices on social media.”

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.

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