Elon Musk and Twitter

As of yesterday, Elon Musk, world’s richest lifeform, will buy Twitter and take it private. I am related to a long-time Twitter employee. This is more personal for my household than most.

I have long been a free speech advocate. I am not someone who thinks there should be no limitations on speech in any context. But I care about free speech principles a great deal.

Twenty years ago, I was more open to the idea that the Internet/Web might create spaces where the U.S. constitutional free speech rules (that is, the First Amendment) would be the standard. Such a space would be almost entirely free of official constraints on speech—so called “hate speech,” legal under the First Amendment, would be allowed, for example, but would be naturally countered by more speech that would drown out the prejudice, was the theory.

Since then, my long experience in and alongside the tech industry in the Bay Area has proven to me the impossibility of upholding such a standard online. The demonstrable cultural crises that have arisen as a result of social media—mass disinformation and widespread lies, utterly toxic online environments, extreme political polarization, the spread of outrageous conspiracy theories, real-world violence, racial animus, sexual animus, personal bullying, an epidemic of depression, thousands of preventable COVID deaths, genocide…

These crises show that social media, as we’ve imagined it in the last decade, is dangerous to society. If you want me to mount a detailed argument to prove this, I’m sorry, I won’t be doing that. It’s a popular argument these days.

I don’t consider the collective crisis to have much to do with free speech. You could say it has been promulgated by naive techno-utopian thinkers who lacked the foresight (as well as any incentive) to think through the consequences of creating a world-bestriding, always-on party-line for billions of people without any mechanism for moderating expression. But that doesn’t even need to touch on free speech principles; you’ve already got a recipe for TNT simply in allowing that many people a place to express their unfettered but benign opinions.

It’s a dark universe network effect—the more people using these networks, the worse they get. There are many reasons for this, but a foundational reason might be simply that it overrules aspects of human behavior that we have evolved—for example, real world communities have size limits. That is, if a tribe becomes too big, it fragments into multiple tribes. Those tribes may well have times of contact and cooperation between them (or times of war), but they are not forced to interact all day long.

Each of those separate tribes will develop its own norms and collectively work to keep tribe members within that frame of behavior.

Social media is every tribe coming together, without agreement, without understanding the different norms and customs, knowing little about each other, and then trying to come to an agreement about which type of fish is sacred.

Elon’s fanboys and girls are excited (on Twitter) for him to bring back free speech to the platform. But the current situation on Twitter, in which there is censorship around various disallowed types of speech, including temporary bans and permanent bans for breaking the rules, has come about precisely because the platform has been trying to find ways to allow the most people to speak out in their own voices as possible. While straight, white men may wonder what all the fuss is about over online toxicity, every other type of person experiences that toxicity every day. The “just mute the voice you don’t want to hear” solution proffered almost exclusively by straight white men doesn’t work as well when you, a woman or person of color or trans person or gay person, are bombarded by hatred all day long.

My favorite social network—the only one that I think really works—is Reddit. People who don’t use Reddit tend to think of it as a cesspool. But most of the subreddits that I visit function as heavily moderated public squares devoted to specific concepts, often broken down tribally. In these spaces, debate and discussion is common, and commonly fairly polite. I have had great experiences in communities on Reddit that I have rarely had on other social media—because there are a lot of rules and because there isn’t absolute free speech.

Elon Musk lacks the attention span to really solve any of these problems, particularly if he thinks the problems on Twitter are about something called “free speech.” Instead, this is the end of Twitter. So, maybe there is a silver lining.