A triumphant Elon Musk sashayed this week into the headquarters of Twitter carrying a kitchen sink and the hopes of many frustrated users of the social media giant. The world’s richest man purchased the world’s most-aggravating website in the hopes of restoring freedom of speech to the platform.
So, what could this takeover mean for Twitter and for the country? Musk has promised to restore many banned accounts, most notably that of former president Donald Trump. This is good news, by all means unlock the gates of Twitter jail.
He has also suggested he might fire two thirds of the employees who must feel like they are about to have a meeting with the Bobs from “Office Space.” Again, cutting the bloat, especially in areas that actively suppress speech is a positive step.
The real opportunity for Musk to make a difference and achieve his goal of a global public square free from biased censorship is in content moderation. One thing he can and should do immediately is to sever all connections with third-party fact-checkers used by Twitter to judge what is or is not misinformation.
Twitter unlocks the New York Post Twitter account.
The simple fact is that the American fact-checking industry is dangerously broken beyond repair. It was these supposed experts and credentialed institutions that crushed debate over COVID-19 policy under their censorious boot for 2 years. It was these same ill-informed technocrats who buried the Hunter Biden laptop story and wrongfully suspended the account of the New York Post.
The whole point of a marketplace of ideas is to let the market determine which are good or bad, which are true or false. When a prominent account posts an obvious lie, which happens about once every 15 seconds, there are thousands and thousands of users ready to point their fingers and laugh, bringing attention to the lie. And if even if some are missed it is better that a dozen lies go unchecked than that a single important truth be hidden from the people.
Once the fact-checkers are shown the door, Musk could do a great service to the entire social media industry by opening up the hood and doing an autopsy of the last decade or so to see why exactly censorship of conservatives is so much more common. Is it because left wing users are more likely to report on what they see as bad content? Is it the bias of the content moderation teams? Is it the algorithm? Transparency on that issue would be groundbreaking.
Musk will also have to deal with the fact that he just bought a platform widely used by malign foreign actors from authoritarian states like Russia and China to perform information operations on Americans.
This is a very real problem that needs to be addressed, but it ought not be done by limiting the user’s access to information. Rather, the foreign actors must be exposed and punished for their activity in coordination with the Defense Department. Such partnerships are the best way to blunt deceitful foreign influence.
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Musk has stated that he will not allow Twitter to become a “free-for-all hellscape,” and though at many times that seems to be exactly what Twitter is and was meant to be, one can see his point. A basic set of rules with punishments for violation, a general code of conduct should be all that is used to judge content.
We don’t need to talk about the “health” of the conversation or any other New Agey gobbledygook. Don’t threaten violence, don’t be overtly racist, don’t dox people. Those are the kinds of neutral rules that Twitter can and should operate under which will not chill the speech of millions.
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Musk has a very rare opportunity to change the way that social media, the driving engine of our social discourse, treats its users. If he can create a global cafe of free speech, we will all be better off for it. There will be mistakes, missteps and gaffes along the way, but he deserves a little patience as he discovers just exactly what it is he purchased. For now, we should wish him luck, and maybe help him out a bit by trying to behave ourselves on Twitter.
