Elon Musk’s Twitter is fast proving that free
speech at all costs is a dangerous fantasy
Nesrine
Malik
Reinstating the likes of Donald Trump and Kanye West
looks likely to turn the social media site into an extremist ghetto
‘Elon Musk believes Twitter has a leftwing and liberal
bias that should be corrected.’
Mon 28 Nov
2022 01.00 EST
Free speech
absolutists are like the cocky audience of a spectator sport – they think they
could do better than the players, if they were just allowed a crack at it. To
them, speech should be as free as possible, period. Nowhere is their
oversimplification of the issue more evident than on social media, where abuse
and disinformation have created a new frontier of regulation – and with it a
cohort of disingenuous free speech warriors.
These
absolutists are so unaccustomed to facing consequences for their actions that
they have pushed the idea that a censoring “woke” orthodoxy now prevails, and
is a threat to freedom of expression. Elon Musk is among them, but since his
takeover of Twitter he is having to learn quickly that free speech is not
simply about saying whatever you want, unchecked, but about negotiating
complicated compromises.
Musk
arrived at Twitter with an approach that I am sure he thinks is pretty
straightforward. The site, he believes, has a leftwing bias that should be
corrected by allowing suspended users back on to the platform. The accounts of
Donald Trump, Kanye West and Jordan Peterson have been reinstated, along with
nearly all those that were suspended for falling foul of old Twitter’s rules on
abuse and hate speech.
This means
that Twitter is about to turn into a far more unpleasant and potentially
dangerous experience. Little of this appears to have anything to do with a
political strategy on Musk’s part. Like Trump, Musk has become the tribune of
fascists and racists by way of adolescent contrarianism, an insatiable need to
flaunt his control and a radicalising inability to cope with being told he’s
wrong on the internet. For him, “free speech” seems merely a vehicle for his
delusional plan to make Twitter into a fawning “digital town square” that he
presides over.
But not
even the richest man in the world can pull that sort of free speech arena off.
Twitter isn’t sustained by previously suspended users, but by the millions of
people for whom the platform feels (most of the time) like a political and
cultural slipstream. Twitter has an odd social media profile. It is both
extremely influential and also often quite trivial, and the coexistence of the
two is what makes the site viable. Twitter is a window into the soul of
politicians and opinion-makers – its style of interactive rolling commentary
works well in drawing them out to post their views or engage with others,
revealing personalities and politics that otherwise would be surpressed or
closely edited. And it is the first resort of citizen journalists and those
marshalling political protest. It also remains the only social media platform
where people with little clout or profile can challenge elites directly.
But Twitter
is also a solipsistic place, where even small users can become protagonists in
spats that are then amplified both by the site’s algorithms and a rightwing
media that trawls it for telltale signs of “wokeness” or “cancel culture”. For
better or worse, it is Twitter’s adjacency to current affairs and general
political and cultural discourse that makes it, uniquely among platforms, feel
relevant.
If you’re
not on Twitter, chances are that you have come across stories that started out
or were precipitated there, whether it’s a debate on trans rights that swirls
around JK Rowling’s tweets, or calls to organise street protests against
dictators in the Arab world. For all these things to be possible on the same
site, robust content moderation is necessary to ensure conversations don’t
descend into doxing (maliciously publishing someone’s personal information) and
hateful conduct, and that news and journalism is verifiable. In the absence of
moderation, or at least the appearance of it, things fall apart pretty quickly.
When a place is not fun or hospitable or truthful to users, it also becomes
commercially pointless for advertisers. Since Musk took over, half of Twitter’s
top 100 advertisers are reported to have left the site. If things continue as
they are, it is hard to see a future for the company.
The
ultimate cause of that demise will be the failure of Musk to understand that
for some speech to be free, other speech has to be limited. It is generally
true that if a service is free then it is by definition exploitative of its
users – if you are not paying for a product, the axiom goes, then you are the
product. But in the case of social media, the regulation of your speech is the
product. If a platform becomes too toxic, then it is useless for anyone except
those who want an extremist ghetto of agitators. In that sense, social media is
very much like society in general. Political and legal authorities are in the
business of content moderation, in order to make our shared space as stable and
safe as possible for a majority of people. The public and other stakeholders,
such as the press, businesses and social media companies themselves, are in
constant negotiations with these authorities on what those limits should be –
for instance, whether religious dress is protected speech, or what constitutes
incitement to violence.
Old Twitter
was far from perfect, and by its own admission its algorithms favoured
rightwing accounts. But it was improving because of the drag that advertisers,
regulators and users were putting on its algorithmic urge to encourage
antagonistic activity. The high-speed destabilisation of Musk’s Twitter should
be a warning to free speech absolutists. The set of curbs they object to are
those that make users’ experience of social media, and life in general,
possible; they protect against, among other jeopardies, libel, impersonation,
plagiarism, misinformation and grooming. In essence, all our free speech
arguments are about finessing, rather than obliterating a system of functional
restrictions.
Those with
power have more leeway to define what free speech is, but they can rarely do so
without limitation. Twitter’s chance of survival is dependent on whether Musk
chooses to accept that, like freedom of speech, his power is not absolute.
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