Tech

3 ways Musk can support free speech


Back in the Paleolithic in April, Elon Musk seems to glad to buy Twitter and said he wanted to transform the site by promoting free speech.

A lot has happened since then: Musk speak he no longer wants to buy Twitter and the company suing to force him through the acquisition process. Only one the court today.

Agreement is still possible. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explore three suggestions for what Musk could do if he finally owns Twitter and is serious about pushing the boundaries of online expression.

Provide more transparency on Twitter’s inner workings

Moderating online chats can be difficult and Twitter and other social networking sites mess with a regular number. Moderators make suspicious calls, and sometimes people don’t know why a post was deleted or why Twitter took or didn’t take action.

Online freedom and trust will be enhanced if people can understand the decisions made by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and have the opportunity to voice their grievances. That requires more investment and openness from Twitter and its peers to interpret their sometimes tough calls for judgment regarding online expression and easier ways for users to appeal those decisions.

Supporters have also suggested change the law to ensure that journalists and academics can analyze what happens under the guise of sites like Twitter. Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, suggestions on Twitter last week that Musk could request an independent audit of the company’s content moderation policies and practices.

Making the inner workings of Twitter transparent won’t change what people may or may not say there. But it could build public trust if there were more answers to important questions like: Social media algorithms prevent conservative views? How often does Twitter make mistakes, by keeping posts that violate its rules or by deleting posts by mistake? How to Twitter’s computer system amplify political content?

Allows more political expression

Several experts in the online speech told me that Musk can build trust in Twitter as a place to encourage a strong exchange of opinions by ensuring that the site allows posts from elected officials and candidates of the United States and only Limit discussions on political topics in extreme cases.

Deciding when Twitter and other sites should intervene and remove political posts or ban accounts is a challenge. We’ve seen this debated as many believe that Donald Trump and other officials had too much time to post false statements about voter fraud on Twitter before and after the presidential election. 2020.

But the Knights First Amendment has speak that it is important for websites to make “heavy assumptions about making political speeches” and “react in a deliberate manner to violations” of community standards .

Essentially, what the experts are saying is that people benefit from judging what their elected leaders say and from talking about their government and its policies, even when some chats contain misinformation or even bigotry. That’s not far from what Twitter policy said.

There are limits to the practical approach to online political speech. Twitter experimented with the addition of flaws but deserved it contextual information to potentially misleading political posts. And most experts in the field of online expression believe that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been reasonable in launch Mr. Trump from their websites after last year’s Capitol riots. (Some of them believe his suspension should now be lifted.)

Challenge governments that restrict citizens’ right to expression

Rarely in the US are American internet companies placed in a position to protect ordinary people from online censorship, harassment, or incitement to violence by their governments. But that happen frequent outside the WE.

Twitter is sometimes a strong defender of citizens who use the service to criticize their own leaders. It sue India this month to challenge the government’s interpretation of a law restricting posts related to civil liberties, demonstrations and press freedom. It can do much more.

If Musk is really serious about giving a voice to those less powerful than himself, he could pledge to push back as governments try to suppress free speech – and encourage the US government to support support internet companies when they do so.

We need to continue to discuss how relatively new means of communication and persuasion work to advance our understanding of the world.


  • Anonymity is the “last double-edged sword”. NGL is the newest application to allow people to post questions and comments anonymously, my colleague Valeriya Safronova writes. Former anonymous messaging apps like ASKfm, Secret, and Yik Yak struggled to stop bullying and threats of violence and eventually broke out.

  • Necessity is the mother of the invention: The Verge wrote a fascinating history of blind programmers have created two generations of screen readers, programs that speak aloud text on a computer screen. Inventors – including two who met as children at a music camp in Australia – filled a gap in technology that was mostly created by visionary programmers.

    Related: Some blind and low-vision people say that automated tools that were supposed to make websites more accessible to them have instead made it harder to use a screen reader, says my colleague Amanda Morris.

    Earlier from On Tech: ‘Innovation in motivation for people with disabilities’

  • Nepal gets bored of your TikTok videos: Some tourist and religious sites in the country have tried to ban people from taking videos online with their pretexts. “For them, it’s nice to get all the likes, but for travelers like us, it’s unsettling,” said a frequent visitor to the sacred garden in Lumbini. told The rest of the world.

Never mind the dog is growling in front of the statue.


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