Elon Musk’s pledge to do away with anonymity on Twitter will only serve to limit the very freedom of speech the billionaire is promising to promote following his $61.4 billion buyout of the social media platform, a leading privacy advocate has warned.

Announcing his buyout of Twitter last week, Mr Musk said he intended to “make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans”.