Why Twitter Is Unlikely To Become The 'Digital Town Square' Elon Musk Envisions
On Monday, Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the world’s richest man, struck a deal to buy Twitter for about $44 billion. Twitter users have been tweeting all week about what it means — in large part because it’s not clear how Musk, who plans to take the company private, will change the platform.
In his statements about his intent to buy Twitter, Musk espoused the importance of free speech to democracy, calling the social media platform “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” He also stressed that he is against censorship. Many have interpreted this as Musk wanting to significantly alter how Twitter regulates hate speech and misinformation.
But the digital town square Musk is envisioning might not materialize because Twitter has never lived up to its goal of being a marketplace of ideas. More than that, Americans seem to dislike the social media platforms that forgo content moderation entirely, with anything-goes platforms never being quite as popular as the larger platforms that limit some of what users see. A town square that is a free-speech free-for-all risks becoming the kind of place that few people want to visit, which serves as its own limit on the kind of speech it fosters.
Twitter as it exists now fills a particular spot in the social media ecosystem. Almost all the information we have shows that Twitter, even more than some other platforms, is used by a relatively small percentage of Americans. Important people like politicians, business leaders, journalists and celebrities do make statements or announcements on Twitter that have real-world consequences, and it has been useful for activism, serving as a starting point for the evolution of new political conversations and movements. Black Twitter users, in particular, report finding Twitter useful in this way. Overall, though, Twitter might be more accurately described as a scrolling newspaper than a public square. Other social media sites, like Facebook, stretch farther into the information ecosystem and are likelier to reveal what most Americans are currently reading, sharing and saying.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-twitter-is-unlikely-to-become-the-digital-town-square-elon-musk-envisions/
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