Why everyone’s wrong about Twitter and Elon Musk
1. Twitter is not a “digital public square”. Please stop saying that, whether you’re on the left or on the right. It’s a private online platform where people can and do write mostly nonsense. It’s popular, but not nearly as popular nor politically consequential as people seem to think.
2. No, Twitter doesn’t need to be regulated or broken up because of its impact on democracy. Twitter will, inevitably, go the way of MySpace in time. It will go the way that Facebook is going right now. Almost without fail, the claims that this or that large company is “actually a monopoly” prove in time to be complete nonsense, usually because the people who say those things have zero understanding of what a monopoly actually is, and zero historical perspective (again, see MySpace and the many contemporaneous calls to break it up because it was claimed to be a “monopoly” at the time). 99.99999% of companies that have their day in the sun, eventually fade away into the background, get gobbled up, or go bust. A miniscule percentage persist and loom large in the public awareness, misleading people into overestimating the permanence of the commercial status quo.
3. Free speech. My God, where do I begin? Bear with me:
(a) The only coherent approach to free speech in the context of *rights*, as far as I can tell, is the following: if I legitimately own a private space, platform, business, home, whatever, I have the *right* to set (or not set) the terms of use. I get to set the conditions under which you may stay, and under which you are required to leave. As long as those terms are not criminal, anything goes. That can pertain to conduct, speech, whatever. So if, for instance, you want to enter my house and a requirement of entering and staying is that every 5 minutes you have to shout “Hugo is great! Hugo is king!”, and whenever I speak, you must nod in quiet agreement and cannot question me, then so be it. Luckily, mine isn’t the only house. So a thousand flowers can bloom in terms of “free speech” conventions across households, businesses, etc etc. Outside of the sphere of private environments (whether singly or collectively owned), on the other hand, things get messier. Rights to free association and free expression in the public sphere are, as an abstract commitment, commendable. But at the practical level, lead to all sorts of confounding problems (how do we determine who has a right to protest if three or four different groups demand a particular public space to protest about their respective hobby horses? How does my “right to disassociate” from you in a public space and to use that space peacefully, reconcile with your right to speak freely in that same space and declaim loudly on your preferred topic? Etc etc). Luckily, in the context of the current debate, public sphere questions are irrelevant (see point 1 above).
(b) Now in my house example, while I’m within my *rights* to set the terms of use as I have done, it’s hardly the most “free speech” friendly setting. So in the context of my house, the *value* of free speech is not particularly well enshrined.
However, imagine a house where literally anything goes. Anyone can say anything whenever they want; people can be rude, obnoxious, loud, interrupt, be racist, defamatory, etc etc etc. Is that a “free speech friendly” environment in the *value* sense? Absolutely not! Obviously! Free speech isn’t the same as 100% unmoderated speech. The latter, especially at scale, would be a shitshow. As Adam Bates points out, there are already several social platforms on the internet that already approach something like the 100% unmoderated speech model (e.g. 8hcan), and they’re a sesspool of trolls, belligerent racists, and any number of types whose primary goal is to create an absolute dumpster fire environment from an intellectual point of view.
(c ) So what’s the correct formula for maximising free speech as a *value*? That is to say, what’s the optimal approach to forum/platform moderation such that people can express themselves as freely and openly as possible, without it devolving into a complete mess of vitriolic trolling, noise, bigotry etc?
The correct answer is no single person has a clue. But the best meta-approach, the best means to discovering and eventually approximating that approach, is to allow several competing institutions and platforms to experiment with more and less of this rule or that, more or less of this algorithm or that, more or less of this kind of exclusion-condition or that kind.
4. Does this mean that everything is therefore in fact hunky dory from a free-speech-as-a-value point of view across our various social platforms and media forums? Absolutely not! And this is where people like Adam Bates are being disingenuous. Clearly we *do* have issues with platforms like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook *overpolicing* what should in fact be perfectly acceptable speech. The way that such platforms moderated discussions about Covid-19 over the last 2 years, for example, is a perfect demonstration of that. Throughout 2020 it was essentially a thought-crime on several of these platforms to suggest that the lab-leak hypothesis MIGHT be something worth looking into a bit more. Speculative discussions about perfectly plausible phenomena like natural immunity were habitually flagged as misinformation. Several other egregious examples of social media suspension of accounts for completely innocuous statements that happened to violate certain pseudo-progressive dogmas can be picked out from over the years, whether pertaining to race issues, gender, or any other of several controversial subjects.
We definitely *do* have a free-speech-as-a-value problem in western nations, socially and culturally. Language policing has reached an absurd nadir among certain progressive and left-wing factions. Conservatives too continue to cover themselves in hypocritical ignominy with their insistence on fighting censorious fire with more censorious fire.
Again, I don’t want to suggest that I have the silver bullet when it comes to figuring out how you tread that line between allowing open debate about contentious issues, and admitting all manner of troll and outright bigot. But it’s clear as day that we’re nowhere near that point yet, and that Twitter and other platforms leave a lot to be desired on that front.
5. Which brings us to Elon Musk. Is he the man for the job? Will the weird and wonderful Elon figure it out? Absolutely, 100% not! Based on several of his recent tweets and public statements, it’s pretty clear this guy grasps NONE of the above nuances. He has no idea what he means when he writes the words “free speech”. He seems to think Twitter is a “digital public square”. He seems to labour under the misapprehension that free speech as a value is essentially equivalent to 100% unmoderated speech. And so I suspect this guy’s “corrective” to the imperfect policing that currently characterises Twitter will be a massive overcorrection in the direction of platforms like 8chan. If that’s the way he’s going, Twitter will be defunct even faster than I would have predicted prior to this debacle.
