What will Twitter look like under Elon Musk?

It’s official: Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is about to be in charge of Twitter. Musk paid $ 44 billion to acquire the social media platform with the stated goal of turning it into a “free speech” refuge.

The web is full of speculation about what this means. Conservatives and abandoned people on the platform have pushed for Musk to reinstate banned accounts, including that of former President Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, prominent Twitter figures now say they will leave the platform in protest of its new owner. Among them is English actress Jameela Jamil, who he tweeted His fears Monday that Musk “will help this hellish platform reach its final form of utter hatred, bigotry, and misogyny.”

It is unclear whether Musk will be able to make all his plans for Twitter a reality. The technology leader has floated less moderation, less publicity, and an open source algorithm. But Musk’s stated ideals contradict his own actions.

What Musk says he wants

Musk has made it clear that he wants less moderation, which he considers censorship, on the platform.

“Freedom of expression is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the city’s digital hub where vital issues for the future of humanity are debated,” he said in Monday’s announcement of the acquisition .

He also said he wants to defeat “spambots,” or automated accounts that mimic real users; open the algorithm to public inspection and “authenticate all humans” using the platform.

Musk set out a definition of speech in a TED interview last week.

“A good sign to know if there’s freedom of speech is if someone you don’t like can say something you don’t like? If so, we have freedom of speech,” he said.

Musk said Twitter would comply with national laws restricting speech worldwide. Beyond that, he said, he would be “very reluctant” to remove posts or permanently ban users who violate company rules.

Earlier, he had criticized Trump’s ban on social media following the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Twitter and Facebook permanently banned Trump’s story on the basis that incited violence.

“A lot of people will be very unhappy with West Coast high technology as a de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk tweeted days after Trump was banned from both Facebook and Twitter.

How Musk responds to the disagreement

Musk’s own story, however, calls into question his commitment to letting people who don’t like him speak. As documented in the Popular Information Bulletin, Musk does this regularly blocked users that they criticize him or Tesla; threatened Tesla union prosecutors and corporate whistleblowers; and has aggressively persecuted short sellers and journalists who are critical of Tesla, sometimes calling his work “fake” or “misleading.”

In 2018, he launched a revenge on Linette Lopez, an Insider journalist critical of Tesla, a move that writer Felix Salmon called “obsessive and upset.”

Musk’s popular tweets often send a swarm of his social media followers directly to journalists ’accounts to harass them for hours or days.

Some scholars say Musk’s abandonment approach threatens to take Twitter back to its bad old days, when harassment and abuse were widespread.

“With Musk, his stance on free speech, just letting it all go, that would be bad in itself,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University. “If you stop moderating, with automated systems and human reviews, a site like Twitter, in a short period of time, you would have a meltdown.”

Some former Twitter employees are also dismayed by Musk’s successful bid for the company.

“Twitter will let a man-boy essentially take over his platform,” said Leslie Miley, a former Twitter employee who has also worked for Google and Apple. Miley, who was the only black Twitter engineer in a leadership position when she left the company in 2015, echoed doubts shared by others about Musk’s understanding of the complexities of the platform.

“I’m not sure if Elon knows what he’s getting,” Miley said. “You may just find that having Twitter is very different from wanting Twitter.”

Free speech does not attract advertisers

A decade ago, a Twitter executive called the company “the wing of free speech of the Freedom of Speech Party,” underscoring its commitment to unhindered free speech. But the company backtracked after reports of online abuse and harassment became frequent.

In the U.S., a 2014 visceral article by journalist Amanda Hess exposed the relentless and vile harassment that many women suffered just for posting on Twitter or other online forums. Twitter also learned of the consequences of a moderating social platform – primarily undermining its advertiser funding.

Ads are how Twitter makes money, and companies generally don’t want their ads to show up against violent threats, hate speech that leads to incitement, or incendiary information aimed at tipping elections or undermining public health.

Google, Barrett noted, quickly learned this lesson in the most difficult way when it was important companies like Toyota and Anheuser-Busch removed their ads after passing YouTube videos produced by extremists in 2015.

Once it became clear how unhealthy the conversation had become, co-founder and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey spent years trying to improve what he called the “health” of the conversation on the platform.

The company first adopted the “report abuse” button after UK MP Stella Creasy received a barrage of rape and death threats on the platform. The online abuse was the result of a seemingly positive tweet in support of feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez, who successfully advocated for novelist Jane Austen to appear in a British ticket. Creasy’s online bully was jailed for 18 weeks.

Twitter has continued to develop rules and invest in staff and technology that detect violent threats, harassment and misinformation that violate its policies. After evidence emerged that Russia used Twitter platforms to try to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, social media companies stepped up their efforts against political misinformation. However, all have struggled to define “misinformation” and have been accused of leaving false content and over-censoring legitimate publications.

Hard to relax in moderation

The big question now is to what extent Musk wants to get these systems back and whether users and advertisers will stay if they do.

Like Miley, a former Twitter engineer, experts who have studied content moderation and researched Twitter express doubt that Musk knows what he is getting himself into. After all, there are many incipient examples of so-called freedom-of-speech-focused platforms that have been launched in recent years as alternatives to Twitter, largely by conservatives dissatisfied with Twitter’s crackdown on hatred. , harassment and misinformation. Many of these sites have struggled to deal with toxic content, and at least one has been cut short by their own technology vendors in protest.

“This move only shows effectiveness (moderation functions) in annoying those in power,” said Kirsten Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. “I would worry about how that would change Twitter’s values.”

The fact that no other bidder appeared in public before the Musk deal was a sign that other aspiring buyers might find it too difficult to improve Twitter, Third Bridge analyst Scott Kessler said.

“This platform is pretty much the same one we’ve had for the last decade or so,” Kessler said. “You’ve had a lot of smart people trying to figure out what they should do, and they’ve had problems. It’s probably going to be hard to move forward a lot.”

Even now, Americans say they are more likely to be harassed on social media than any other online forum, with women, people of color, and LGBTQ users reporting a disproportionate amount of this abuse. About 80 percent of users believe companies are still doing only “fair or bad” work to deal with this harassment, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults last year.

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• Elon Musk
• Twitter