I guess billionaire rapper and fashion mogul Kanye West (“Ye”) didn’t want to wait to see if Elon Musk is serious about restoring free speech to Twitter. Just days after being kicked off of Twitter, Ye has struck a deal to buy the free speech social media site Parler. In a statement, Ye said "In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves," and that he will make sure Parler users are “uncancelable.”

https://www.foxbusiness.com/entertainment/kanye-west-buy-parler-vows-make-conservative-opinions-uncancelable

The CEO of Parler’s parent company, George Farmer, said this deal will “change the way the world thinks about free speech. Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again. Once again, Ye proves that he is one step ahead of the legacy media narrative.”

On the other hand, I wish he weren’t associating conservatism and free speech with the type of statements that we need free speech to counter.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/10/16/kanye-west-attacks-jewish-media-jewish-control-black-voice-latest-antisemitic-rant/

Personally, I’m not crazy about seeing so many outlets bought by billionaires, but they’ve brought it on themselves by targeting and driving away half their customer base. Ideally, these companies would renounce politics and work to serve customers and maximize shareholder profits. If that fails, then someone should launch a competing service to take their customers away from them, as Parler did, and as Gabpay is doing to Paypal.

Having free speech-supporting billionaires buy them is far from an ideal solution. But maybe it beats having your speech monitored by a leftist UC-Berkeley grad with a nose ring and a snotty attitude.