The reason Twitter accepted Musk's proposal 4:38
(CNN) --
Four years ago, Twitter co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey laid out four key areas of focus that would drive the company's growth.
One was to promote what he called "healthy conversation" on the platform.
After years of criticism for Twitter's apparent failures to prevent its platform from becoming toxic, Dorsey acknowledged the scourge of "abuse, harassment, armies of
trolls
," as well as
bots
, disinformation campaigns, and "chase cams." increasingly divisive echo" on the social network, and asked the researchers to help improve the situation.
"We think it's a long-term growth vector, and it's the right thing to do for people at Twitter, and the right thing to do for the world as well," Dorsey said on the company's fourth-quarter 2018 earnings call about the focus on Twitter. "health" of the platform.
In the years since then, Twitter has made significant progress toward that goal, including banning many accounts that promote abuse and
spam
, adding labels for false or misleading information, banning the wrong gender of transgender people and the launch of a team dedicated to studying and increasing transparency around the technology that determines what content is promoted on the site.
Last week, Twitter said it would adopt third-party tools to help users prevent harassment.
But some who have followed Twitter's work in recent years worry that may change now that billionaire Elon Musk has managed to acquire Twitter in a deal worth some $44 billion.
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Musk, a controversial Twitter user with a history of erratic behavior on and off the platform, called for greater freedom of expression on the social network and policies that encourage most tweets and accounts to be abandoned.
"If in doubt, let the speech exist," Musk said in an interview onstage at the TED conference earlier this month.
"If it's a gray area, I'd say let the tweet exist. But obviously, in the event that there's maybe a lot of controversy, you wouldn't necessarily want to promote that tweet."
Under his ownership, Twitter could roll back steps it has taken in recent years to make the platform more acceptable to its most vulnerable users, typically women, the LGBTQ community and people of color, according to security experts.
In addition to alienating employees who have worked on or supported efforts to improve content moderation on the platform, reversing Twitter's advances in "healthy conversations" also risks losing users at a time when the company has been struggling to reverse its slow growth.
It could also ward off advertisers who are wary of their ads appearing alongside harmful content.
Although Musk has said that his bet on Twitter is "not a way to make money", it is still a business and advertising remains his main revenue driver.
Although smaller than some rival platforms, Twitter also wields great influence
online
(and
offline
) because it is popular with influential figures in media, politics, and entertainment, and because it has often acted as a model. for other platforms on how to tackle the thorny issues of harmful content.
Therefore, changes to Twitter's policies could have broader effects on politics and society.
There's no doubt that Twitter hasn't been perfect when it comes to content moderation, but as Kirsten Martin, Professor of Technology Ethics at the Notre Dame Mendoza School of Business, says, "Twitter has constantly striven to be a responsible social media developer, not only through its content moderation, but also through its engagements in the field of machine learning ethics."
"I would be concerned about how this would change the values of Twitter," Martin added.
Twitter and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A billionaire with a history of trolling
Musk has a mixed reputation in the tech industry.
He is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and successful innovators and entrepreneurs of this era, but he is also someone who has hovered around the controversy, often from his own Twitter profile, where he has 83 million followers.
Over the years, Musk has used Twitter to make misleading claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, to make an unfounded accusation that a man who helped rescue boys from a cave in Thailand is a sexual predator, to making fun of people displaying their gender pronouns on the platform and for making countless jokes related to the numbers 420 and 69. He has also tweeted a (since-deleted) photo comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler, and has compared the new CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, with Joseph Stalin.
Elon Musk is one of the most high-profile but controversial users of Twitter, where he has more than 83 million followers.
Musk and others have pointed out that most of Twitter's board of directors has little experience actually using the platform.
The same cannot be said for Musk, an avid Twitter user with a rabid following who understands the dynamics of the platform well.
However, Musk's experience of using Twitter, as an ultra-rich white male, is inherently different from that of most users, and especially those who are women or from other marginalized communities that Twitter has targeted. to protect and may now be at risk if their moderation policies are reversed.
"Anytime someone says free speech, it always means free speech for the powerful. It doesn't mean free speech for the less powerful," said Leslie Miley, a former Twitter engineering manager who started its product security team and left. the company in 2015. "[Musk] says he wants to make it a free speech platform. What he wants is a platform to say what he wants – and he wants other people like him to say what they want – without any accountability."
For his part, Musk said on Twitter on Monday: "I hope even my biggest critics are still on Twitter, because that's what free speech means."
Prominent users like game developer Brianna Wu have for years denounced how Twitter mobs can turn from online hate speech to real-world harm.
She now worries that the progress she and other users have driven on Twitter will be reversed.
"There have been a lot of tough battles over these [security] policies behind the scenes," Wu, who now works as the executive director of a PAC for progressives, told CNN Business.
"I am deeply concerned that Musk is going to roll back all the hard work that has been done to combat hate speech on the platform."
These are the changes that Elon Musk could implement on Twitter and thus affect you as a user
Musk's plan for Twitter
At the TED conference earlier this month, Musk laid out his broad vision for Twitter, including making its algorithm public to increase transparency around its app and content promotion decisions, a move experts say it is far from a miracle solution.
Additionally, Musk said that Twitter should be more "reluctant to take things down" and "very cautious about permanent bans."
"My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is highly trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization," Musk said.
Many followers of the company have speculated that Musk could reinstate former President Donald Trump's Twitter account, which was banned early last year after the insurrection in the US Capitol.
That move could have huge implications in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, as Twitter was a key tool for Trump to rally his base, promote his political allies and mock critics, and spread false and misleading claims.
"If Musk buys Twitter, it will surely bring Trump back onto the platform, opening the door to a viable candidacy in 2024," Joan Donovan, Research Director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said on Twitter on Monday. , before the deal was announced.
Trump, for his part, told Fox News on Monday that he does not plan to rejoin Twitter, if invited, and instead will start using his own app Truth Social (Trump has only posted to the site once. , in February).
"I hope Elon buys Twitter because he's going to make it better and he's a good man, but I'm going to stay TRUTH," Trump told Fox.
Donovan also noted that under Musk's leadership, Twitter could "become even more of a culture war arena."
With a "free speech" mandate, the kind of harassment that content moderation defuses will be set in motion by targeting LGBTQ groups, women, BIPOC people, and anyone fighting for civil rights."
Musk said in a statement Monday that he also wants to "make Twitter better than ever by improving the product with new features, making algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating
spam
bots
,
and authenticating all humans. "
".
A platform with more work to do
Each of the major social media platforms has faced pressure from lawmakers, researchers, and the public to do more to combat abuse, harassment, and misinformation, and have taken different approaches with varying degrees of success.
In many cases, Twitter has been considered an industry leader in how it deals with problematic content, and in the transparency of its approach and the success of its efforts.
Notably, Twitter was the first of the major platforms to ban Trump for violating its incitement to violence policy, pushing other platforms to follow his example.
"Today is not great, but it is better," said Wu.
"I think people don't understand how much we have to lose."
Twitter's board of directors has reached an agreement to sell the social media company to Elon Musk.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said he is hopeful that Twitter will continue to be a place where people can speak freely while feeling safe.
"When I say safe and secure, I mean intolerance and the kind of terrible trolling that makes it too toxic for many of us," he added.
Others, however, are less optimistic.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said Musk has a "very unsophisticated view" of the factors a platform should consider when "providing access to bad actors for normal people."
Harmful content can have real-world consequences – the Myanmar genocide and the Capitol riots are two of the most egregious examples – but a deluge of offline harassment and veiled threats of harm can also take a heavy toll on users. individually – and social media platforms face a difficult balancing act as they consider how to allow users to express themselves as freely as possible while protecting them from such harm.
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Although Musk has said he wants to allow "all legal expression on Twitter," the lines of what is legal may be blurry and vary from country to country, and may also change soon as regulators focus on harms. social media platforms can have on users, especially young people, and on civic processes.
"Twitter has started to talk about the morality of what it does, in a way that implies it understands it," Ahmed said.
But with Musk, "it seems like... we need to go re-educate another kind of billionaire, libertarian, man-child that [Twitter] is the real world... I hope he can see the difference between being a jerk and being dangerous." ".
Some experts also question whether a less moderate platform would be a sustainable business.
Several new platforms launched in recent years have promised to take a less restrictive approach to content moderation, often hoping to attract right-wing users frustrated with big tech giants, but have largely failed to do so. time to get a meaningful adoption.
The most recent example: Trump's Truth Social.
Online advertisers are also wary that their ads will appear next to dangerous or controversial content.
"The general public doesn't want to see more conspiracy theories and more bullying and more hate speech," said Karen Kornbluh, senior fellow and director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund.
"There's this [disconnect] between saying you want to do [easing content restrictions], which sounds like a culture war initiative, versus saying you want to increase your profits. It doesn't seem to make sense."
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