As midterms near, Musk’s takeover spells disaster
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As the US midterms enter the final stretch, Lucy Thompson argues that Elon Musk may not be the most responsible custodian of the influential social media platform.
A megalomaniac billionaire and ‘free speech absolutist’ with the keys to the world’s largest political megaphone – what could possibly go wrong?
Late on October 27th, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, declared on Twitter (of course) that ‘the bird is freed’ and he had successfully bought the platform. For free-speech advocates, this is tantamount to the second coming, but for many, Musk’s mission to make Twitter an unfiltered "common digital town square” is more of a nightmare.
Musk’s plan to loosen moderation rules and allow figures such as Donald Trump to return to the site has sparked fears that the platform could become a hotbed of misinformation and abuse. And if his first weekend as owner is anything to go by, we are in for a bumpy ride.
Eleven days before the US midterms, which will decide who is elected to the Senate and the House of Representatives, and on Musk’s first day as ‘Chief Twit’, a far-right conspiracy theorist broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco and attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. The horrific attack was yet another reflection of the febrile political atmosphere in the country, with threats against members of Congress on the rise since the deadly January 6 insurrection last year.
Musk’s response was to essentially pour kerosene on the fire and tweet a conspiracy theory about the attack, from a newspaper that once claimed Hilary Clinton had died and it was a body double who debated Trump in 2016. The tweet was swiftly deleted, but not before the theories had seeped into the Republican mainstream. On Friday and Saturday, Bloomberg reported a surge in hate speech on Twitter. That included a 1,700% spike in the use of a racist slur on the platform, which at its peak appeared 215 times every five minutes, according to data from Dataminr.
Is this what Musk meant when he said Twitter should enable healthy debate? While he is not wrong that the online world, which is currently in partisan splinters, could benefit from an open forum for discussion, his vision of a ‘digital town square’ is far from a safe, or productive place to be. What we must learn from attacks like that on Pelosi, is that online abuse and misinformation can result in tangible acts of political violence and it must be taken seriously. This is a lesson Facebook learnt far too late after the Capital Riot left five dead and Musk must take note.
Ahead of the midterms, stability is needed to defend against political misinformation that could deceive voters, or undermine the legitimacy of the results. Musk’s decision to cut 25% of the workforce and make himself the sole director of the company so soon before the elections (including firing the company’s head of policy and the chief legal counsel, who had overseen Twitter’s content moderation and safety efforts), raises questions about whether Musk has the ability, or indeed the impetus to tackle this global issue.
While politicians here in the UK have been relatively quiet so far, Musk’s belief that the content moderation line should only be drawn at illegal posts risks running afoul of the delayed Online Harms Bill, which will compel platforms to moderate “legal but harmful” content. He may also have a battle on his hands with policymakers in the EU, who are already carving their regulatory pitchforks.
Instead of a volatile billionaire, who is more focused on managing the 13bn in debt he has incurred from the acquisition and using Twitter as his personal megaphone, the platform would be safer in the hands of a community of people. Members of civil society, government and industry who have an insight into the platform and an interest in making public digital spaces fit for purpose and importantly, safe. For too long, we’ve ceded control of the social media platforms we use daily to advertisers and several powerful men with deep pockets.
While this may sound like a utopian pipe dream, this is also the position of former CEO Jack Dorsey who said, “It can’t be a company. This is why I left … It can’t have an advertising model … It should be funded by a foundation.”
For now, the future of the platform is in the hands of Musk who is taking the company private and as such it will be far harder to regulate. All we can hope now is that the pragmatic businessman inside him wins out and rather than allowing dangerous ideologies to run rampant, he sees the benefit of content moderation – even if it’s just for the advertiser’s sake.
By Lucy Thompson, Senior Associate, Audley.