When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he promised to restore its commitment to free speech, eliminate its progressive bias and otherwise preserve its role as the “de-facto public square.” Instead, as anyone who has had the misfortune of spending time there knows, he turned it into a right-wing echo chamber — one increasingly populated with spam, crypto scammers and sexualized images of women and children. If this is the public square, it’s in the wrong part of a very shady town. 

Musk’s political weaponization of Twitter helped Donald Trump win the 2024 US election and fuelled the rise of right-wing politicians in other countries, including our own. But as progressives and other non-Conservatives have fled the platform, it has turned against its new masters — and forced them to fight amongst themselves. “As the elite echelons of the MAGA movement slowly descend into obscure online disagreements and testy turf wars between rival influencers,” Ian Ward wrote for Politico back in January, “conservatives are starting to confront an unpleasant possibility: that the right’s domination of X is doing more to divide the MAGA movement than unite it.”

The same is proving true here in Canada. Pierre Poilievre, whose rise to near-power was........

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