Elon Musk holds vote on whether Twitter has free speech - and warns of 'consequences'

Elon Musk is known for his influential tweets on cryptocurrency, and posting memes but now he's held a vote on whether Twitter has free speech.

The Tesla CEO asked his 79.1m Twitter followers a couple of questions about the social media platform concerning free speech.

"Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?" Musk asked and gave users the options of "Yes" or "No" to choose from.

In a follow-up tweet, Musk warned people to think about their answer to his poll and wrote: "The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully."

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The final results show that 2,035,924 votes were cast, with the "No" winning out with 70.4 per cent of the vote and only 29.6 per cent voting "Yes."

Musk is certainly not the first to raise concerns on free speech not being adhered to with Donald Trump launching his own platform after getting permanently banned from Twitter.

Musk has been making the most of Twitter's poll feature as he previously asked his followers whether the "Twitter algorithm should be open source."

An open source algorithm would mean that people are able to find out how Twitter decides what content to show on their timeline.

In this particular poll, 1,117,574 votes were cast with "Yes" winning unanimously with 82.7 per cent of the vote and only 17.3 per cent of those who voted chose "No."

Musk has recently made it clear how he would vote in his Twitter poll as he shared his "worry" about the "de facto bias" in the Twitter alogrithm and questioned: "How do we know what's really happening?"

In response to Musk's poll on whether the Twitter algorithm should be open source, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey who left his role as CEO of the platform last year shared his thoughts on the matter: "The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone."

The polls caused widespread discussion on the topic of free speech as some noted that private companies like Twitter do not need to adhere to the First Amendment as the social media platform is not part of the government.

While others have urged Musk to buy Twitter or even create a social media platform of his own and some believe this could be the important consequences he is referring to.

As the richest person in the world with a current net worth of over $250 billion according to Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index list, he could launch his own if he wanted to.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see...

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