We Can't Let Billionaires Control Major Communications Platforms [View all]

[Thaddeus]

[We Can’t Let Billionaires Control Major Communications Platforms[b]
Published by @VWPickard in The Nation

Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO notorious for posting asinine tweets to his 80 million–plus Twitter followers, has purchased himself a position of power within the platform itself by becoming the company’s largest shareholder.

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Indeed, Musk’s tweets contain troubling clues about his hopes for Twitter. Beyond advocating for creating an edit button on individual posts and other, more eccentric proposals, Musk has implied that Twitter should amend or abandon its content moderation policies and follow his preferred version of free speech, which should give us pause.

While Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” it’s clear that this commitment doesn’t apply to those in his employ. Under Musk’s rule, Tesla has worked to stifle dissent, including trying to silence a Black employee for coming forward with allegations of racial discrimination and firing a female engineer after she detailed a culture of “pervasive harassment” at the company. It appears that Musk’s allegiance to free speech applies only to powerful people like himself, while those working under him are forced to settle for quiet obedience.

Regardless of Musk’s dubious principles, any move to relax content moderation standards warrants legitimate concern. For example, changing the policies by which Twitter restricts or suspends accounts that cause social harm could yield more harassment, hate speech, incitement to violence, and dangerous misinformation about voting and vaccines. Twitter’s uneven adherence to its own rules has been rightly criticized, but having no rules would be a troll’s paradise—a Hobbesian hellscape of all against all, with the most vulnerable having the most to lose.

Read the rest here: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/elon-musk-twitter-board/