Way back in the Paleolithic era of April, Elon Musk seemed eager to buy Twitter and said he wanted to transform the site by promoting free speech.
A lot has happened since then: Musk says he no longer wants to buy Twitter and the company is filing a lawsuit to force him to go through with the acquisition. Today there was a court hearing.
The deal may still come. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explore three suggestions for what Musk can do if he eventually takes ownership of Twitter and seriously pushes the boundaries of online expression.
Bring greater transparency to Twitter’s inner workings
Moderating online conversations can be difficult, and Twitter and other social media sites mess up with some regularity. Moderators call questionably and people sometimes don’t know why a post was removed or why Twitter did or didn’t take any action.
Online freedom and trust would be enhanced if people understood the decisions Twitter, Facebook and YouTube make and were given the opportunity to voice their grievances. That requires more investment and openness from Twitter and its colleagues to explain their sometimes difficult judgment calls regarding online expression, and easier ways for users to appeal those decisions.
Proponents have also proposed changing laws to allow journalists and academics to analyze what goes on under the hood of sites like Twitter. Jameel Jaffer, the Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, suggested last week on Twitter that Musk could conduct an independent audit of the company’s content moderation policies and practices.
Making the inner workings of Twitter transparent doesn’t change what people can or cannot say there. But it could boost public confidence if there were more answers to important questions such as: do social media algorithms suppress conservative views? How often does Twitter make mistakes, keeping posts that break the rules or accidentally deleting posts? How do Twitter’s computer systems work strengthen political content?
Allow more political expression
Several online speech experts have told me that Musk can build trust in Twitter as a place that encourages vigorous exchange of ideas by ensuring that the site allows messages from US elected officials and candidates and discussions on political topics only in limited in extreme cases.
Deciding when Twitter and other sites should step in and remove political posts or ban accounts is the challenge. We saw this debate when many people believed that Donald Trump and other officials had too much leeway to post false allegations of voter fraud on Twitter before and after the 2020 presidential election.
But the Knight First Amendment Institute has said it’s important for sites to make a “heavy assumption in favor of withholding political statements” and “respond in a measured way to violations” of community norms.
Essentially, what the experts are saying is that people benefit from evaluating what their elected leaders are saying and talking about their government and its policies, even if some conversations contain misleading information or even bigotry. That’s not far from what Twitter is policy already say.
There are limits to a hands-off approach to online political speech. Twitter has experimented with adding flawed but valuable contextual information to potentially misleading political messages. And most online expression experts believe that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were justified in booting Mr. Trump from their sites after last year’s Capitol riots. (Some of them believe his suspensions should be lifted now.)
Challenge governments that restrict citizens’ speech
Rarely in the US are US Internet companies placed in a position to protect ordinary people from online censorship, harassment or violent instigation by their own government. But that happens regularly outside the US
Twitter has at times been a strong defender of citizens using the service to criticize their own leaders. It took India to court this month to challenge the government’s interpretation of a law that curbs messages related to civil liberties, protests and freedom of the press. It could do a lot more.
If Musk were serious about giving a voice to people far less powerful than he is, he could commit to backing down when governments try to crack down on free speech — and encourage the US government to crack down on internet companies. support when they do.
We must continue to discuss how relatively new means of communication and persuasion should work to increase our understanding of the world.
Before we go…
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Anonymity is “the ultimate double-edged sword.” NGL is the latest app that allows people to post anonymous questions and comments, writes my colleague Valeriya Safronova. Previous anonymous messaging apps like ASKfm, Secret and Yik Yak struggled to contain bullying and threats of violence and eventually flared up.
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Necessity is the mother of ingenuity: The Verge writes a fascinating history of the blind programmers who created two generations of screen readers, programs that speak the text on a computer screen aloud. The inventors — including two who met as children at an Australian music camp — filled a gap in technology usually created by sighted programmers.
Related: Some blind and partially sighted people say that automated tools designed to make websites more accessible to them have instead made it harder to use screen readers, my colleague Amanda Morris reported.
Previously from OnTech: ‘Disability stimulates innovation’
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Nepal is tired of your TikTok videos: Some tourist and religious sites in the country have tried to ban people from recording online videos on their premises. “For them it’s nice to get all the likes, but for visitors like us it’s disturbing,” a frequent visitor to a sacred garden in Lumbini told Rest of World.
Hug for this
Don’t bother to tell the dog that growls at a statue.
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