By all accounts, Elon Musk is a brilliant businessman, but a reliable arbiter of free speech? I do not think so. musk brags his purchase of Twitter is designed to return Twitter to its glory days as a 280-character fortress of free speech, where users can post whatever they want, with no consequences to themselves or Twitter. Easy to promise, impossible to deliver.
Memo to Elon: If you intend to ditch “The Twitter Rules” (aka Twitter’s content moderation policies), you can say goodbye to many of Twitter’s digital advertisers and welcome a new cadre of bailiffs global regulators determined to prevent Twitter from repeating those glory days. If you want to transform Twitter into an ad-free version of Telegram or Gab, go ahead.
Advertisers will not tolerate their ads being amplified along with harmful speech. Case in point: the Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW) recently requested Twitter to purge the Twitter account of the rabidly anti-Semitic neo-Nazi “National Justice Party (NJP)”. NJP’s account had over 50 major US corporate ads amplified. Advertisers contacted by CSW were furious when they learned that their ads legitimized a radical white supremacist organization that incited violence.
In the hoopla surrounding Musk’s bold free speech narrative, let’s not forget that it didn’t take long after Twitter was created in 2006 for its executives to discover that there are many bad actors, who easily started to hijack Twitter to spread the hate, incite terrorism, empower autocrats, facilitate sex traffickingY allow criminal enterprises – just to name a few of the Twitter transgression realities that require constant internal moderation of content.
As the reality of bad actors crashed Twitter’s “free speech” party, a whole new cottage industry of content moderators armed with a bunch of guidelines emerged, forcing Twitter to oscillate between arbitrary censorship Y public security. And every country where Twitter operated developed its own rules and regulations that govern Twitter’s conduct, complicating any effort by Twitter management to enforce a “one size fits all” user guide policy.
Case in point: last Saturday, the European Union adopted the Digital Services Law (DSA) forcing social media platforms to remove flagged hate speech, terrorist propaganda and other content deemed illegal by the European Union. Does Musk think he can bypass the DSA, thereby risking billions of dollars in fines?
At least among members of the European Union, the DSA will finally end the sloppy policies of self-regulation and arbitrary censorship that every social media platform has adopted. It will be one of many rude awakenings Musk will have when he takes over.
For the same reasons the EU adopted the DSA, Musk’s takeover of Twitter adds more urgency for Congress to finally hold social media companies accountable for basic missteps enabled by their platforms against the American public.
Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and other major social media platforms have their own rules and regulations that prescribe what speech is allowed and what is not, and no one is responsible for the consequences. of your policies
Harmonizing these arbitrary rules into a code of understandable standards would make Musk’s job easier. That’s why the Coalition for a Safer Web proposed the formation of a new Social Media Standards Board (SMSB). An SMSB would not only develop and monitor compliance with an unbiased code of harmful speech, but also provide social media users with a resource to protest code violations by the platform and monitor algorithm amplification. The SMSB could be empowered by Congress to lift the Section 230 immunity of social media platforms that consistently violate the code.
The rising tide of domestic extremism and the Possible return of Donald Trump to Twitter should be reason enough for Congress and the Biden administration to stop whistling past the Twitter graveyard. Allowing Musk to establish an entirely new set of “free speech” Twitter content moderation policies is not a solution to the plague of harm Americans suffer from privately run social media platforms.
Marc Ginsberg served as the US ambassador to Morocco during the presidency of Bill Clinton; He previously served as Deputy Senior Advisor to the President for Middle East Policy and was a legislative aide to Senator Edward Kennedy. He is currently president of the Coalition for a Safer Web, a nonprofit social media watchdog group.
Reference-thehill.com