Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter Free Speech Zone

Fixing Twitter might be Elon Musk’s biggest challenge yet, and this is a guy who hopes to die on Mars. After a long, tempestuous takeover process, this week Mr. Musk closed the $44 billion deal, marched into Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, and promptly cleared out the C-suite.

Users now await Mr. Musk’s plans for the social site, which are hard to distill into 140 characters. A good first step would be to emphasize that dissenting views on political topics like Covid-19 or climate change won’t be throttled as “disinformation.” Mr. Musk could move the company to Texas, as he did for Tesla. Simply getting the site’s employees out of the San Francisco bubble might help.

On the left, the reaction has been like something out of the Book of Revelation. “The sun is dark,” tweeted a journalism professor. A writer at the Verge argued: “It turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of s— racists.” The left dominates American media, but it sounds horrified that Mr. Musk might be politically ecumenical.

“It is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square,” Mr. Musk wrote Thursday in a missive to advertisers. “That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.” This does not sound like anything goes.