By buying Twitter, Musk will have to face the reality of his speech on free speech

A decade ago, Twitter executives, including then-president of the company Dick Costolo, declared that the social network was the “free speech wing in the free speech party”.

The stance meant that Twitter would defend people’s freedom to post what they wanted, and be heard around the world.

Since then, Twitter has been dragged through various complications caused by propagators of disinformation, abuse by governments to incite ethnic violence, and threats by elected officials to jail employees of the company for tweets they displeased. Like Facebook, YouTube and other internet companies, Twitter has been forced to transform itself: from a hardline defender of free speech, it has become a nanny for online communication.

Today, Twitter has page after page of rules that prohibit content such as material that promotes child exploitation, coordinated government propaganda, counterfeit product offers, and tweets that express a wish that someone has a serious accident.

The past ten years have seen repeated clashes between the lofty principles of the founding generation of Silicon Valley social media companies and the complicated reality of a world in which “freedom of speech” can mean different things to different people. And now Elon Musk, who on Monday reached an agreement to acquire Twitter for about $44 billion, will become part of that troubled story.

Successive generations of Twitter leaders, since its founding in 2006, have learned what Mark Zuckerberg and most other internet execs have discovered: declaring that “tweets must flow,” as Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, wrote in 2011, or that “I believe in giving people a voice,” as Zuckerberg said in a 2019 keynote, is easy to say but hard to do.

Musk’s deal to take control of Twitter puts the feisty billionaire, who is also the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, at the center of the world’s dialogue on free speech. Musk was not specific about his plans for when he becomes owner of Twitter, but he expressed irritation that the company removed tweets and deleted users, and said Twitter should be a safe haven for unrestricted expression, within the limits of the law.

“Free speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital meeting place where questions vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement announcing the transaction.

Musk is a relative dabbler on the topic, and has yet to face the struggle to balance situations where giving one voice can silence the expression of others, and where a space in which almost anything is acceptable in terms of freedom expression ends up buried by spam, nudity, propaganda by autocrats, bullying against children and incitement to violence.

“We need to protect free speech in order to make our democracy work,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that promotes free speech, at Columbia University. “But there’s a long way to go between that premise and the kind of decisions social media companies make every day.”

Almost nowhere on the internet or in the physical world is a zone of absolute freedom of expression. The challenge of online expression is the challenge of expression alone, with questions that have few simple answers: when is greater freedom of expression better, and when is it worse? And who should decide?

In countries with strong courts, civic organizations and a press that holds politicians accountable, elected leaders who attack their opponents online can be a relatively benign phenomenon. But in countries like Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and Somalia, government leaders have weaponized the social network to subject their critics to relentless verbal attacks, to spread lies that spread almost unchecked, or to incite ethnic violence.

If Twitter wants to step back from the work of moderating freedom of expression on the site, will people be less willing to frequent a space in which they can be attacked by those they disagree with or in which they can find themselves buried by ads for cryptocurrencies, exchanges Counterfeit Gucci or Pornography?

The 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit vote that same year gave Silicon Valley executives, US elective officials and the public a glimpse of what can go wrong when social media companies choose not to interfere too much. what people say on their websites. Russian propagandists amplified the views of the divided Americans and Britons, further polarizing the electorate.

During Donald Trump’s presidency – especially in the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic and then when Trump supporters began to spread false accusations of electoral fraud in the 2020 election – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube changed their tone regarding the role they played. playing in instilling anger, lies, distortions and division, which left some people exhausted and made them look cynically at the world around them.

Twitter and Facebook, sometimes under pressure from their workers, took further steps to remove or label messages that could violate their rules on false information and altered their computer systems to prevent the rapid and wide spread of viral lies. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube also deleted Trump from their platforms after the January 6, 2021, invasion of the US Congressional headquarters.

New laws, including the Digital Services Act in the European Union, require Twitter and its peers to do more to eliminate misinformation and abuse on their sites. In other countries, such as Vietnam, social media companies run legal risks when people publish criticisms of the government that the government deems excessive. Twitter and other social media companies are in a position to potentially undermine free speech and democracy if they intervene too little in what people post online, but also when they intervene too much.

One of the paradoxes of the Silicon Valley revolution is that it stole the powers of former guardians of information and persuasion, such as media moguls and political leaders, but created new ones. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter won’t change that. We may not want these digital media barons to have such power, but the reality is that they do.

Translation by Paulo Migliacci