How will the purchase of Elon Musk influence freedom of expression?

The Twitter council of directors has announced that it will accept Elon Musk’s acquisition, the richest man in the world. This surprising capitulation, is it favorable for users?

Musk offers $ 54.20 per share, which represents $ 44 billion as a total price of the company: it is one of the highest prices ever paid in a business acquisition.

Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions will borrow $ 25.5 billion to Musk, which will contribute around 20 billion own dollars. More or less the amount of the bonus he hopes to receive from his company Tesla that he has achieved the objectives of the last quarter.

Musk has assured that his intentions such as Twitter owner “free his extraordinary potential to become the platform of freedom of expression worldwide”. This is specified in the letter sent to the current president of the company.

This conviction in the potential of a social network to become a model of freedom of expression without limits is based on an idealistic approach to the social networks that have been around for a long time.

In reality, Twitter has a single owner, whose tweets false, sexist, interested and probably defamatory, a risk for the future of the platform.

Will there be a radical change?

Musk’s maneuver can be observed negatively because it gives it an unprecedented power and influence on Twitter. He has already pointed to some changes he would like to make the platform, such as:

1.- Restructuring the current management team, because it claims to have no confidence in them.

2. Add a button of editing to the tweets.

3.- Limit current moderation control over the content of the tweets: Use temporary suspensions instead of absolute prohibitions.

4.- Explore a transition to a payment model such as Spotify, in which users can pay to prevent the most pushy advertisements.

Earlier, just after he had become the largest individual shareholder in Twitter at the beginning of April, Musk had stated: “I don’t care about all the economic part.”

Although it is likely that the bankers who will borrow the $ 25.5 billion to worry. Musk will feel that pressure if he doesn’t get Twitter to give benefits. Although he ensures that his priority is freedom of expression, advertisers on the platform, for example, do not want their products to be announced in addition to a furious extremist tweet.

In recent years, Twitter has launched a series of measures for governance and degree of content. In 2020, for example, it expanded its definition of what a “damage” is to guide the treatment of COVID-19 content that opposed authorized recommendations.

Twitter ensures that all changes that have been made to date in their approach to the degree of content “are employed by the public interview” and focus on incorrect information and misleading information. He also confirms that he responds to the experiences of abuse or incivism that users are confronted with.

But this implementation of measures to moderate the content can also be interpreted as an attempt to keep his reputation after many negative advertisements.

The idea of ​​the ‘public square’

Anyway, and whatever the real reasons are for these attempts to moderate the content, Musk has publicly battled many fights for these tools from the platform.

It has even tagged the platform as ‘a de facto public square’. A naive explanation, at least. It was already warned by Microsoft Tarleton Gillespie Communications: to think that social networks can function as True Open Spaces is a fantasy, because they have to control the content at the same time when they claim to do that.

Gillespie even suggests that platforms would be obliged to moderate users, to protect users against their dialectical enemies and to withdraw offensive, toxic or illegal content. It would be the only way to present their best face to new users, advertisers, partners and the general public. The difficult, according to him, is to have the critical capacity needed to know “exactly when, how and why intervene.”

Platforms such as Twitter cannot be set up as public squares, especially because only a small part of the audience uses them.

In addition, public places are implicitly and explicitly regulated by the behavior that regulates our social mutual relationships and are supported by the possibility of resorting to an authority to restore order if the condition arises. In the case of a private company such as Twitter, the final decision for a single person falls: Musk.

But although Musk came to launch his specific ideal of Public Square, it might be a personal and free version of this concept.

Giving users more margin in what they can say can create a larger polarization and harden the speech on the platform. This will in turn probably discourage advertisers. Without a doubt, a problem in the current Twitter -economic model (90 % of the income comes from advertisements).

Freedom of expression: For everyone?

Twitter is much smaller than other social networks. However, research shows that it has a disproportionate influence, because the tweets are particularly fast and viral and reproduce in traditional media.

The tweets that stand out for each user are the result of an algorithm that wants to maximize exhibition and clicks, and are not intended to enrich the user’s life with interesting or respectful views.

Musk has also suggested that he will open access to the algorithms used by Twitter. An improvement in transparency. But as soon as Twitter is a private company, the degree of transparency that you want to keep will depend solely on what he concludes.

Ironically, Musk has accused the Meta -CEO (formerly Facebook), Mark Zuckerberg, of too much control over the public debate.

And yet in the past, Musk himself tried to suppress the views of those who have been critical of him.

There are little evidence that should be based on believing that it really intends to create a free and inclusive space on Twitter, and even less to think that the changes they make for common interest are.

This article is published in ‘The conversation. ‘