Although social media is not the same as spacecraft, the first one is not simple either. In 2022, owning a social media firm is as much about running a business as it is about preventing very real societal ills like as harassment, disinformation, and harmful mental health effects. Musk isn’t just indifferent about harassment and disinformation, two of Twitter’s most serious dangers to the social order; he’s also a well-known perpetrator of both. Musk may believe he understands what’s best for Twitter’s company — and perhaps he does; he’s extremely wealthy, which, in the lack of insight, appears to be more than enough for most of life’s activities!
However, Twitter now appears to be on the right track, focusing on the correct issues (new products, new revenue streams, new users). It’s a shame that the world’s wealthiest man would sabotage that progress for his own amusement. After a too-long period of passivity, Twitter began taking more significant moves toward curbing the evils that had persisted on its platform for years at the conclusion of the Trump era, leading the industry on dynamic content filtering, but still leading. The firm quickly created additional misinformation tools and generally opened up about its policy-making process, including the refreshing acknowledgment that its set of rules was a live document fashioned by imperfect individuals rather than a collection of inflexible regulations.
During that time, it became evident that, despite years of claiming differently, the most sensitive policy choices finally came down to one person’s instinct about what was either the most correct, or at least appeared the least wrong at the time, at Twitter and every other major social network. Most notably, the corporation took the courageous, albeit long overdue, step of slapping a permanent lifetime ban to the then-president for his part in instigating violence during the Capitol insurgency. Jack Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter’s CEO late last year, is no longer the company’s hunch-maker.
However, if Musk’s bizarre extracurricular gambit succeeds, he may be revealed to be a petty man driven by a misunderstanding of free speech, which largely entails posting whatever you want on a privately owned social network regardless of the potential harm it may cause — an intellectual posture that he oddly does not extend to his own employees when they dare to disagree with him. It’s easy to envision Musk undoing Twitter’s accomplishments on hatred and abuse, as well as derailing a lot of the company’s vital, smart work. That’s a pity.
In his letter to the board, Musk stated, “I invested in Twitter because I believe it has the potential to be the global platform for free expression, and I believe free speech is a social requirement for a healthy democracy.” “However, after making my investment, I’ve come to recognize that the firm, in its current form, can neither prosper nor serve this societal necessity.” He went on to say, “Twitter has enormous potential.” “I’ll get it unlocked.” Twitter has been heading in a hopeful path for those of us who would like to see it grow into a more helpful, less poisonous service for real-time information and very sometimes really amusing jokes.
From the company’s aspirations to create a choose-your-own-algorithm open standard and its premium subscription product Twitter Blue to new anti-harassment tools designed to mitigate the social network’s disproportionate burden on the often marginalized voices that Twitter can, in its finer moments, amplify, the social network has at long last begun to show some spring green. However, this expansion is in jeopardy. Rumman Chowdhury, who leads Twitter’s AI ethics team that works on algorithmic harms, noted “Musk’s instant chilling impact” at the firm last week after Musk seemed to change course on taking a board seat with his investment. “Twitter has a lovely culture of funny constructive criticism,” she said on Twitter, praising the firm for doing the right thing by its employees by keeping Musk out of the henhouse. “The trolls have descended,” she said later as she muted the discussion.
