Necessary Competition

TWO TWEETS BY Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, on consecutive days portend that social media, at least in its current political avatar, might change. Whether you welcome the nature of that change would entirely be a function of which corner of the ideological fence you sit on. These were his tweets: ‘Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?’, followed the next day by, ‘Is a new platform needed?’. To a question whether he would do it, he answered that he was seriously considering it.

Why is this important? For an answer to that, the disease must be identified first. These platforms, even though private companies, now perform a critical public function with their absolute control over the information that directly feeds into people. Facebook, for instance, is repeatedly charged with becoming a willing tool to tamper with elections, sometimes by agencies of other countries. YouTube has recently just taken off an interview given by Donald Trump to a third party, after all major social media had earlier joined together to evict him from the public square. An elected politician who led the most powerful country in the world had been made invisible. Ordinarily, you would want to let the marketplace and competition take care of such tyranny. If a company loses legitimacy, people would just shift to another platform. But the sheer size of these entities now, hundreds and thousands of billions in value, and the data they have stored away of users to refine their services, make it just about impossible for any new entrant. Unless it is someone like Elon Musk, who has equal deep pockets and also credibility because he has no political alignment, except to the idea of free speech.

What social media companies like Twitter now do is to use technology to filter out information that doesn’t fit in with their policies, to make for a better user experience. This is a process that can be easily manipulated, especially if the employees charged with this job are ideologues in disguise, who have a view on what is good and right, and from that fundamentalism, have no compunction in turning the platform itself into their image. People who get banned have no certainty of getting their public life back even if they have a strong case.

With Musk, the approach would be the opposite. Because his interest is not in control (a reason he also promoted cryptocurrency), the technology of any social media he plans will be designed to enforce decontrol. If an algorithm is asked to not do something, then the possibility of human intervention becomes less. It also makes it easier to refuse governments who try to twist your arms. Like Apple does, when police or espionage agencies ask them to unlock iPhones—they just reply that it is impossible even for them. It is deliberately structured that way. There is need for such an approach to social media too. This was its promise in the beginning until ideology and profits changed its direction.

Donald TrumpElon Muskfreedom of speechsocial mediaTwitter