I think the one thing you're missing out is the true potential downside. Which is that over the last decade Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms. Musk's position is basically "Do what Mark Zuckerberg did in the early 2010s". There is a reason why facebook no longer acts like that, there's a reason facebook has changed it's name to disassociate from that. And Facebook didn't suffer from their actions there - the commonwealth did.
Potentially this is Musk bringing back systematic misinformation, troll farms, accidentallly enabling genocides etc. etc.
You're not necessarily wrong, but Twitter's moderation policy is already basically terrible and I have very little confidence that they'll be able to improve it significantly in the future with or without Musk. Most of the moderation policies that they are proposing are regularly co-opted to target oppressed or minority groups. They don't seem to be particularly consistent or great about catching abuse in the first place. The site's structure itself seems to encourage bad actors.
It's certainly the case that Musk could potentially make that worse, but I guess I have so little confidence in Twitter's ability to get better on that front that I'm not sure it matters all that much in the long run.
Better moderation on these platforms requires a large re-think in how we approach moderation in the first place, and it requires a more socially responsible perspective about the platform's purpose. I don't think that Musk being in charge or not will make that happen, and if he does turn Twitter into even more of a cesspool, then maybe that'll encourage alternatives.
I'm not an accelerationist when it comes to social media, but I think that Musk/Twitter's attitudes towards free speech online are often both naive and incompetent and the site continuing to worsen might be the only way to get people off of it; and I'm not sure what blocking Musk actually preserves about the site (other than possibly that Musk might push for more aggressive monetization). There are people right now who rely on it that would need to find other hosting, and that does genuinely stink. But... I mean, it's gonna get worse for them regardless.
> Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms
I don't want to be pessimistic, but I don't really feel like social media companies have learned how to handle speech or that they've become competent about doing moderation at scale. I don't think there ever was a point where they figured it out. If we've learned anything it's that moderation at a global scale is kind of unworkable, and that's why having smaller communities that pay more attention to the content they host is so important. I'm particularly pessimistic about the possibility of AI/algorithmic moderation (which many of these companies are leaning into more and more), mostly because I don't see a ton of evidence that it's good enough at scale to replace human moderation.
So I'm not worried about Musk bringing back systematic misinformation or troll farms or accidentally enabling genocide because as far as I can tell Twitter already has that problem; I don't think Musk can bring it back because I don't think it ever went away.
Potentially this is Musk bringing back systematic misinformation, troll farms, accidentallly enabling genocides etc. etc.