On Tuesday, as Elon Musk just started to learn how difficult his new part-time job as owner of Twitter would be, he thought to tweet out a policy pronouncement about his new toy.
“The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all,” Musk declared, either amused or annoyed by those of us who consider him dangerous or unworthy of running a major global communication platform that has been a tool for harassment, disinformation and conspiracy-theory promotion since its inception in 2006.
An hour later, Musk appended that tweet with a mini-essay on the subject:
“By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
It’s unclear how Musk arrived at such a juvenile understanding of free speech or the law. He was raised in an authoritarian country, apartheid-era South Africa, and educated in Canada and the United States. So along the way one would assume he would have had something more than a dorm-room-level discussion about free speech. Like Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Musk seems never to have thought or read deeply about the subject.
I feel bad for Twitter’s lawyers. Now they not only will have to keep an eye out for their corporate owner’s frequent Twitter malapropisms that could get him in trouble with the law (now his misbehavior might have a direct effect on the value of the company or some other aspect), they have to teach Musk the basics of law in the US and around the world. He’s not going to like what he learns. Europe, for instance, just announced a new law that would require Twitter and other platforms to perform serious diligence and make significant changes to restrict harmful expressions. India, the largest democracy in the world and the largest potential market for Twitter, aggressively censors critics of the government and of Hindu extremist movements.
Championing “free speech” seemed to be Musk’s motivating principle as he mounted his campaign a few weeks ago to take over the platform that more than 400 million people use around the world. He has declared that Twitter is a “town square” in which speech should be unfettered by concerns about the propriety or consequences of that speech.
Twitter is in no way a “town square”. Only town squares are town squares. They are public for a reason. And they are local. In America, they are supposed to be forums for open, unfettered expression. They have no rules of decorum. They have no interest in maintaining order to keep advertisers happy or their users comfortable. They are exceptional places. And they are non-commercial.
Twitter, like every Starbucks, McDonalds, shopping center, and radio station, has other obligations and interests. Those spaces must maintain order, decorum, cleanliness, and comfort to keep revenue flowing and customers or audiences happy. That’s why the US constitution protects us only from the censorious power of government, not the needs of private entities to restrict expression that might harm their core missions. US law, Musk might be frustrated to learn, not only allows but encourages digital platforms to moderate the content that flows across them.
Twitter is an advertising company. But it’s also a forum for expression. So its rules and design are, understandably, built to consider both the commercial and expressive desires of advertisers and users. That’s a difficult balance to maintain. No social media company has come close to protecting users and fully satisfying advertisers while also allowing for full range of expression in more than 100 languages around the world. Content moderation at a global scale is impossible to do well, but it can always be done better.
Musk’s pledge to limit Twitter’s content moderation to that which the law of any nation demands leaves, in the US anyway, vast arrays of distracting, destructive, and dehumanizing expression able to flow freely to their targets. For years, women who have expressed themselves freely on Twitter have done so expecting and experiencing threats, the exposure of private information, and constant harassment. This phenomenon – one caused by the proliferation of expression – impedes the ability of millions of Twitter users to express themselves confidently and have their ideas taken seriously.
Trolling is expression that crushes expression. It undermines the ability of groups of people to think collectively and productively about serious issues. Musk knows this. He’s the richest troll in the history of the world. And he’s frighteningly unserious.
Some Musk fans have found their accounts suspended for violating clear Twitter rules against, for instance, deadnaming and misgendering transgender people. Musk himself has mocked the practice of clarifying one’s preferred pronouns.
If Musk understood the real value of speech – to deliberate deeply and respectfully to work through differences and arrive either at solid truth claims or preferred paths of action – he would understand that granting trans people respect, allowing them to participate in conversations that do not get swamped back into facile interrogations of their “choices” and identities, enhances the diversity and quality of public conversation. Respecting the humanity and dignity of others makes everyone more free to discuss and debate issues seriously, deeply and calmly.
If Musk acts rashly and recklessly, as is his modus operandi, he will undo the work of Twitter employees who have strived and struggled these past few years to make the experience of using Twitter more comfortable and safe. While these workers have done much, there is so much more work to do. Even today Twitter is infected by anti-vaccine accounts spreading dangerous claims and thus endangering public health during a deadly global pandemic (something about which Musk also has a concerning record).
And on Tuesday, just minutes after Musk criticized one of Twitter’s top lawyers, a woman in charge of the safety team, she was swarmed with abusive tweets. This real-time demonstration of the problems Twitter faces when trying to maintain a reasonable environment for women to express themselves reveals Musk’s position and plan to be counterproductive to any real commitment to making Twitter a forum for anything other than fostering abuse that silences.
There is hope for Twitter, but only if Musk loses interest in his new toy and spends his energy on any of his other three part-time jobs, running the Boring Company, SpaceX, or Tesla. If he lets the Twitter staff protect Twitter by protecting users from threats and abuse, the company has a chance.
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Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy