It took less than two months for Elon Musk to turn Twitter into exactly what he had accused the social media site of being all along: a town square, with a dictator for a mayor, where policy is enacted and enforced based on caprice and political ‒ or, in this case, personal ‒ grudges.
As of this writing, Musk wasin charge ‒ but a poll he conducted asking whether he should resign as Twitter chief returned a solid majority saying yes. No matter what he decides, Twitter would remain his property, and the company’s imperative would be the same: revive Twitter as a forum and as a business by laying ground rules that apply to all, enforcing them fairly, and informing the community when and how that happens. That is, the opposite of what Musk has done.
If there’s anything to learn from the Musk era at Twitter, it’s that the free-speech absolutism Musk claimed to espouse is untenable as a guiding principle. Those running social media sites will inevitably find something they don’t want on their property. Maybe it poses a threat to someone’s physical well-being; maybe advertisers don’t want their brands next to it; maybe it gets the goat of the guy in charge. There are fair and credible ways to deal with this reality. Then there is what Musk did.
The billionaire capped off weeks of erratic rule-making and rule-revoking by suspending the accounts of several US journalists last week. He said they had posted “basically assassination co-ordinates” for him and his family. It seems he was upset that an account had been tweeting public data about his private jet, so he conjured up a policy to justify banning it and used that same policy to justify banning reporters who criticised the move. Eventually, he allowed many to return.
Next Musk exiled those who repeatedly encouraged users to join competitor services; “free promotion” suddenly, was against the rules, too.
Twitter is a private company and a public square. Any owner has the legal prerogative to govern by whim. But owners also bear an ethical responsibility to strike a tricky balance, protecting speech and safety at the same time. Musk has made a mockery of the enterprise, caring about speech only when it’s his own speech and safety only when it’s his own safety.
This is not only an ethical failure but also a business disaster. Advertisers have fled Twitter. Journalists are some of Twitter’s most important users, and now they ask themselves whether they should leave the social media platform because they can’t report honestly on one of the richest men in the world without risking banishment.
In rebuilding Twitter ‒ or, indeed, improving trust in any number of social media sites ‒ it is unfair to expect that these companies will establish perfect and unchanging rules governing what users can say and how they can say it. Conservatives might want more speech allowed; progressives less. They can disagree in good faith on the limits. No terms of service policy will be comprehensive enough to cover every possible situation in the impossibly vast realm of human interaction.
The important thing is that social media companies try to craft and enforce their rules fairly, and keep trying. The sites are going to get it wrong sometimes, given they’re administrating millions or billions of users saying millions or billions of nonsensical things every day. What matters is that they’re set up to get it right, in aggregate, according to the public commitments they’ve made.
That starts with something as simple as platforms committing to transparency, so that, for example, platforms’ conversations with government agencies and campaigns occur through proper channels and that responses to requests are consistent with existing standards.
Content moderation has evolved beyond a take-down, leave-up binary to include interventions such as labels that add context to posts, prompts that urge users to reconsider posts and algorithms that reduce the spread of posts. Platforms should explain when they’re employing these tactics ‒ at what scale, for what types of content and, most important, to what end. That means two things: companies should study and publish the impact of their content moderation decisions, and they should be able to connect that impact to their stated aims.
Without strictures that recognise the push-and-pull reality of expression on the internet, and a credible process to apply the rules, there will be nothing to guide these platforms if they’re trying to do the right thing, and nothing to constrain them if they’re not. - The Washington Post
The Independent on Saturday