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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reviewing Elon Musk’s takeover bid for Twitter. The agency is expected to decide next month whether to formally launch a full antitrust investigation into the operation.
Will Twitter be the subject of an antitrust investigation in the United States? The question arises as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the American competition watchdog, examines the takeover offer of Twitter by Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars, according to sources close to the matter quoted by Bloomberg. The agency is expected to decide next month whether to formally launch a full antitrust investigation into the operation. If this were the case, the closing of the acquisition could be delayed for several months.
In the meantime, the FTC is already investigating the 9.2% stake acquired by the American billionaire in the capital of Twitter for nearly 3 billion dollars. Carried out in mid-March, this operation had only been revealed at the beginning of April, which had greatly annoyed certain former shareholders of the social network.
Several of them have even filed a class action lawsuit with the American courts, believing that the boss of Tesla and SpaceX had artificially kept the Twitter share price down by delaying in disclosing his stake. According to them, this had prevented them from taking advantage of the rise in the price in the hours and days which followed the revelation of this operation. In this context, the FTC must therefore determine whether Elon Musk has indeed complied with the regulatory requirements, especially since he launched his raid to afford all of Twitter ten days after the announcement of this participation.
Elon Musk’s vision worries
If the American competition policeman is unlikely to find evidence to qualify Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter as illegal, in the eyes of antitrust experts cited by Bloomberg, the operation raises many concerns. The American think tank Open Markets Institute notably considered that this acquisition should be abandoned to avoid giving an already powerful man “direct control over one of the world’s most important platforms for communications and public debate”.
Indeed, seeing a billionaire offer himself overnight one of the most influential social networks on the planet is a question mark. In addition, Elon Musk wants to make Twitter an El Dorado for freedom of expression, but this desire could lead to abuses. Greater freedom of expression left to extreme or conspiratorial remarks could indeed bring many users back to the platform and contribute a little more to the polarization of society, both in the United States and in the rest of the world.
In this context, the absolute freedom of expression advocated by Elon Musk could quickly come up against several limits. “Although it is presented as a battle for free speech, this acquisition is really a battle for content moderation: is it responsible or is it censorship? ‘would attack disinformation and hate speech on Twitter, or allow them to escalate further in the name of free speech’analyzed Mike Proulx, vice-president and director of research at Forrester.
Attentive regulators in Europe and the United States
If the American billionaire seems on track to go through with the process of acquiring Twitter, he will have to be vigilant in relation to the attention paid by regulators to the operation. As soon as Elon Musk’s takeover bid was announced, Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market, reminded the latter that Twitter will have to comply with new European legislation, namely the Digital Services Act (DSA), text which particularly targets social networks, and more generally sites with more than 45 million active users within the EU, such as Twitter. The DSA provides for fines of up to 6% of the annual turnover of these companies. In the event of a repeat offence, the penalties could be increased, even going as far as banishment from European territory.
As for the Federal Trade Commission, Elon Musk should not underestimate it. Meta will not say the opposite, while the group of Mark Zuckerberg will face an antitrust lawsuit, after the complaint of the American policeman of competition, which wants in particular to force the parent company of Facebook to separate from its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp . As a reminder, the FTC is headed by Lina Khan, a real nightmare for technological giants. For the boss of Tesla and SpaceX, it is therefore time for mistrust…