The White House declined to comment on Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and speculation that former President Donald Trump could be reinstated on the platform.
The sale is expected to upend the social media platform’s content moderation practices, which included booting the former Republican president in the days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
“In terms of what hypothetical policies might happen, I’m just not going to speak to that at this point,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
But she said that President Joe Biden believes technology companies must be held accountable for their influence on people’s daily lives, explaining that this was not specific to the Twitter deal.
“Our concerns are not new,” Psaki said. “We’ve long talked about, the president has long talked about his concerns about the power of social media platforms including Twitter and others to spread misinformation, disinformation, the need for these platforms to be held accountable.”
WHAT ELON MUSK UNDERSTANDS ABOUT TWITTER
Twitter agreed to sell the company to Musk on Monday after initially rejecting an unsolicited bid by the Tesla founder two weeks ago.
In a press release, Musk suggested he wanted to protect speech on the service while improving it in other ways.
“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,” Musk said. “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.”
Musk’s purchase has worried some groups that fear harassment on Twitter and Trump’s return to the platform.
In a statement, the NAACP said, “Free speech is wonderful, hate speech is unacceptable” and urged Musk not to allow Trump to return to the service.
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Trump was permanently suspended from the platform “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said at the time. The company said that two tweets had led to the ban, charging that they violated its rules against glorifying violence. In one tweet, Trump called his supporters “patriots,” while in another, the former president said he would not attend the presidential inauguration of Biden.
