Prairie State Wire

Illinois Republican Chairman Don Tracy is cheering on Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

"Liberals are of course freaking out that Tesla founder and billionaire, Elon Musk, has decided to buy Twitter and rescue the world’s largest social media platform from the grips of leftist tech oligarchs who silence conservatives," Illinois Republican Party Chairman Don Tracy said in his weekly memo. "It is a welcome development."

Musk, the richest man in the world, recently purchased the social media giant for $44 billion. He has noted his intent is to restore freedom and openness to the communications platform, whose current executive heading up censorship makes a reporter $17 million per year. Conservatives have long suggested Twitter has a liberal bias in its censorship policies. 

Twitter has been chastised for using "extraordinary tactics" to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal when the news broke on social media in 2020, according to the Washington Post. Before it was removed from the platform, the story was ranked third in the top trending topics on Twitter. On its platform, Facebook also banned and suppressed material. While the platform later changed its mind, the reporting was not picked up by other media until the New York Times endorsed it 17 months later, long after the election had passed, awarding Joe Biden a triumph that is still being contested by many on the right. 

Conservatives expressed displeasure, with noted leftist writer Anne Applebaum after she rejected the value of the story, noting it as "irrelevant." Appelbaum’s comments came after a conservative freshman asked her about the story's suppression at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics panel discussion on Disinformation and the Destruction of Democracy.

Over the last few years, the majority of Twitter's campaign contributions have gone to Democrats. In the 2020 election, Twitter provided nearly $1 million to Democratic candidates, compared to less than $17,000 to Republican candidates.