Is the bird really free?

Elon Musk completed his Twitter purchase on October 27, paving the way for a new and uncharted era for the social media platform. (Photo: Dado Ruvic for Reuters)

Here’s a fun and unfortunate fact about me: I’m chronically online. Among the first things I do in the morning is open Twitter and scroll through my timelines (yes, plural) to check out what happened in the world during the five or six hours I was asleep. I use Twitter to keep up with my friends’ lives, save funny memes and reaction pictures, and do my own share of screaming into the digital abyss.

Twitter is also my go-to platform for real-time updates of the latest news and commentary from local and international sources. Twitter to me is what the morning newspaper was for my parents.

So when tech billionaire Elon Musk finally followed through with his promise to buy Twitter, it was a real moment to rethink whether or not I needed to start reading a broadsheet again.

The head Twit in charge

Despite Twitter putting out little to no profit since going public in 2013, Musk paid $44 billion  (above P2 trillion) and took over the blue bird app with the intention of “democratizing” to promote “free speech.” Under the first few weeks of his leadership, Musk has rolled out paid verification, cracked down on Twitter’s content moderation policies, and fired the transparency and ethics team and the board of directors of Twitter veterans.

Musk also put out a policy that impersonation accounts will be suspended from the platform if they aren’t clear that they’re parody accounts. This move comes after comedians Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin switched their names to “Elon Musk” and matched his icon. Some other Elon parody accounts—despite having identified themselves as parodies—were also banned.

(A real “free speech” move from the guy whose Twitter beef started with a “pronouns suck” tweet meme.)

Already iffy with the platform’s poor return on investment, many advertisers paused paid advertising on Twitter in the wake of Musk’s takeover and his vague plan of action. The number of active users has continued to decline during COVID-19 and interests are shifting towards cryptocurrency and “not safe for work” content, which could be less attractive to advertisers.

But Musk blames alleged activist groups for meddling with advertisers.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” tweeted Musk.

Stronger, not weaker, moderation

To claim that nothing has changed with Twitter’s content moderation is a bold statement, considering Musk’s tenure was kicked off by mass layoffs that gutted teams like product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and core engineering teams. Y’know, the teams that do the groundwork for content moderation.

Musk’s calls for free speech on Twitter focus on two allegations: political bias and excessive moderation. To Musk, minimizing moderation equals freer speech. But research has disproved this claim time and time again.

Political bias on Twitter is actually leaning towards conservative speech, not the liberal ideologies Musk claims. Content from the political right was amplified more compared to the political left. Musk’s accusation of “liberal bias” stands unfounded.

Stronger moderation rules actually manage malicious use on Twitter especially with the emergence of bots and fake accounts. Content teams go through millions of Tweets to try and verify spam. Twitter has policies for suspending accounts and networks that seem to display inauthentic coordinated behaviors like troll farms. It’s far from perfect but at least things are happening.

Dialing back on content moderation could not only weaken Twitter’s protection policies for their users, but it could also empower disinformation and hate speech on the platform.

There was a spike in antisemitism, racism, and homophobia on the platform following the Musk takeover. Environmental advocates have warned that fake news and conspiracies surrounding climate change could further muddle public discourse. And many doctors and scientists on #MedTwitter have jumped ship to platforms with stronger content moderation.

It's too early to tell what exactly will happen with Elon Musk in charge. Scaling back on moderation puts Twitter at risk of breaching corporate obligation to human rights protections and could mean more users and advertisers leaving the platform as it evolves into what Musk promised it wouldn’t: a “free-for-all hellscape”.

“Free” speech, fake news, and eight dollars

“Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission,” Musk tweeted on November 7. He was met with a reply from Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, which is honestly a lot of folks’ thoughts spoken aloud: “accurate to [whom]?”

In promoting an open market of information, Musk’s Twitter runs validation and verification risks made worse by Twitter Blue, an $8 subscription service to get people a verified, blue check icon, among other perks.

Though Twitter puts out disclaimers of whether a user paid for their blue check or as a notable source of information, we can’t ignore just the visual language of how a blue check shows certain users as someone to listen to. The algorithm agrees as it will push “verified” accounts’ content over non-verified accounts.

To have a voice on Musk-Twitter, you either get verified and join the crowd or get drowned out.

(FYI: Twitter Blue paused issuing blue checks until after the US midterm elections. Critics have also called out Musk’s Twitter for being “slow” to move on misinformation during the elections.)

Musk has said very little about how paying for the blue check might enable large-scale paid troll networks or if removing anonymity from Twitter will endanger vulnerable communities. This will be especially crucial as social media evolves into a weapon for authoritarianism to bear down on public discourse and civic action.

A touch of Elon magic

Here are two things to consider when we talk about Elon Musk: Saudi Arabia and China. To stay in the good graces of these two giants, Musk has to work his entrepreneurial mind and keep playing good cop-bad cop with Twitter.

The Kingdom Holding Company and the private office of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal are the second largest investors into Musk’s Twitter following years of large investments in the tech company. After a feud over failed plans to take Tesla private, it seems Musk has secured the trust and funding needed from the Saudis.

Similarly, China is Tesla’s second largest market, their Shanghai plant a main driver in production of electric cars. Chinese business has been booming for Tesla despite China’s strict COVID-19 policies. Cryptocurrency giant Binance, headed by Changpeng Zhao, is a co-investor in Musk’s $44 billion buy and is expected to work closely with his team to put Twitter on the blockchain.

Elon’s big financial backers are counting on him to make their money work for them, whether it’s for Twitter, Tesla, or another company. And I think this could also mean potentially influencing the way discourse runs on the social media platform. The lengths “free speech absolutist” Musk will go to appease them though remains to be seen.

A lot of Elon believers think that, similarly to PayPal, he could turn things around after Twitter goes through growing pains. Maybe Musk-Twitter is just another move to diversify his business portfolio and boost the reputation and sales of his other companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Maybe we should be giving him the benefit of the doubt.

For now though, I’m still going to work on cutting down my Twitter time.