Elon Musk’s Free Speech Gamble

NOW THAT ELON MUSK is going to be the owner of Twitter, the world remains wondering about the impact. That there will be monumen­tal changes in public conversation is a certainty because Musk has said that his objective is to bring free speech back to the platform. And he has consistently over the last few weeks, before making the offer, during it, and now even after winning it, been commenting, often with sarcasm, against Twitter’s policies on the social media platform itself. For instance, he had put up a photo of fellow billionaire Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, that showed his ample paunch and wrote ‘in case u need to lose a boner fast’. He then followed it up with an image of hooded people in a dark background with the tweet: ‘shadow ban council reviewing tweet…’

Shadow-banning, or tampering with access to tweets of followers surreptitiously at the backend, is a practice that Twitter does to accounts. Rightwingers have accused this weapon of being used against them. Even after he won the bid, Musk has not relented. He has made two tweets directly targeting Vijaya Gadde, the legal and policy lead of Twitter, who is in charge of the team that enforces moderation on the platform. To someone’s comment on her role in censoring from Twitter a newspa­per story on laptop contents of US President Joe Biden’s son that al­legedly showed corruption, Musk replied that it was ‘incredibly inappropriate’. The media wrote about how Gadde was receiving hate tweets because of his com­ment but a few days later, Musk put a meme mocking Gadde and her idea of what censorship was, from statements made at a podcast she once went to.

Part of Musk’s attitude to Twitter employees must be a response to how much his owner­ship is reviled by them. Initially, the management and board tried to rebuff his offer of $44 billion to take the company private. They introduced a new shareholder rights plan by which Musk would not have been able to take over the company by buying shares in the open market. But this was a company whose profits and share price had been flatlining for years while other social media companies like Facebook and Google had become 20 times Twitter’s size. There was only one thing that Twitter was indisputably the leader of—it had the jugular of the political discourse across the world. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s ascendancy to US presidentship had been on the back of their Twitter presence. Musk sees Twitter as the ‘pub­lic town square’ of the world where anyone can come and debate issues of common interest. Except that Twitter was being seen as a biased moderator in this square.

It had started off singing paeans of free speech, too, but as the scale, nature of conversations, and its impact became huge, the platform kept adding to a maze of rules on how a user should conduct his speech. No one could really be aware of these terms of consent in their entirety, and such moderation might be possible in a classroom or auditorium but when you have billions and billions of tweets to monitor, the story can take a twist. Algorithms do the sifting, humans then look at a minute subset but even then the sheer scale makes any successful moderation impossible. The stated objective is to keep conversation healthy and free, but what had now been introduced was discretionary power for the biases of the company and its employees to creep into moderation because good free speech or bad free speech is mostly a matter of interpretation.

Musk’s solution: don’t tamper too much, just follow the law of the land which defines free speech. In his letter to the Twitter’s chairman of the board making the offer, the first line says: “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.” Since then, he has made a number of tweets repeatedly highlighting free speech as the fulcrum for his takeover of Twitter, like: ‘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.’

He plans to verify all human beings on Twitter, unlike now when only a few get the privilege of having blue tick marks against their accounts. Then there is the question of how Twitter will make money. He is against advertisements as being the engine, which means there will have to be some other model, probably related to subscriptions

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This is probably the only sane position to take in order not to be swept into the chaos. Twitter’s fall, or the reason why Musk stepped in, was because it had been perceived to have become hostage to a left-liberal ideology of extreme political correctness. Republicans in the US, one-half of the country’s voters, have no doubts that Twitter is biased. Musk, however, is not politically allied. He says that Twitter must be seen to be politically neutral and that also makes for good business because one-half of the ideological spectrum is not alienated and jumping ship to other platforms. Now that ownership has changed, it is the Democrats and left-liberals who are frightened of being censored. In one tweet, Musk said that the best outcome is one in which the extreme 10 per cent of both the left and right are equally unhappy.

Another one of Musk’s promises is to remove bots that inflate subscriber counts. He plans to verify all human beings on Twitter, unlike now when only a few get the privilege of having blue tick marks against their account. Then there is the question of how Twitter will make money. He is against advertisements as being the engine, which means there will have to be some other model, probably related to subscrip­tions. Musk might be worth around $250 billion, but much of it is in Tesla stocks. $44 billion is still too large for him to spend on a vanity project. As the Wall Street Journal wrote: “That [the support of advertisers] may not matter a great deal to Mr. Musk, who said of his own Twitter campaign that it “is not a way to make money” in an onstage interview at the TED conference, on the same day of the filing describing his financial support. But more than half of that backing comes in the form of debt, from Morgan Stanley and “certain other financial institutions,” according to the filing. That means Mr. Musk will need to preserve Twitter’s cash flow—and ideally grow it—to service the debt. Some of that debt is in the form of margin loans backed by Mr. Musk’s Tesla shares.”

No matter what Musk does in the name of free speech, he might still end up being the villain for everyone because Twitter thrives off conflict and anger. It is something that its founder Jack Dorsey had to face when he was CEO recently. But Dorsey has backed Musk and stated that he is the only person who can navigate this difficult terrain. Whatever the outcome may be, there will be far fewer people summarily sent into exile from public life, and that will be a definite improvement.

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Madhavankutty Pillai

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