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(LifeSiteNews) – Tech mogul Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter could be days away from finalization, potentially ushering in a paradigm shift for political speech on social media. 

Twitter first announced the $44 billion sale in April, weeks after Musk, a vocal critic of speech discrimination by digital platforms, revealed his intentions to buy the platform, eliciting a wave of hyperbolic reactions from left-wing users. In the following weeks, however, the Tesla and SpaceX chief began making moves to pull out of the deal, claiming that bot accounts inflated the count of Twitter’s actual user base, and by extension its worth.

The reversal dashed many conservatives’ hopes that new management of Twitter would bring a renewed commitment to free speech on the platform, but earlier this month Musk renewed his offer to purchase the company at $54.20 per share, and Twitter agreed.

The deal is expected to be closed by Friday, October 28, which CNN reports is also the deadline by which Musk has to close or go to trial for reneging on the original agreement.

Alongside final negotiations are rumors that Musk plans to lay off as much as 75% of Twitter’s current staff, of which a Twitter attorney says it does “not have any confirmation,” and that the Biden administration is considering “national security reviews” of Musk’s current business ventures, to which a National Security Council spokesperson said, “we do not know of any such conversations.”

“The long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” says Musk, who has floated the possibility of using Twitter as a basis for a much more ambitious “everything app” called simply X.

Most of the interest over the deal stems from its ramifications for Twitter’s content moderation policies. Like most major online information and communication platforms, Twitter has since 2016 grown more aggressive in down-ranking and suppressing political speech at odds with their left-wing politics, most infamously on the COVID-19 debate, election integrity, damaging stories on Democrat candidates, and transgenderism.

Among Musk’s reported plans to reform Twitter are a more neutral and hands-off approach to user speech, a crackdown on spam and bot accounts, and making its algorithm public in the interest of transparency.

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