Moderation on many platforms has become heavy-handed and arbitrarily enforced. Even in the internet age, the best response to a bad argument is a better one. Experts are sometimes wrong and blowhards sometimes right. This newspaper shares Mr Musk’s free-speech convictions. But when he is the owner, they will raise questions about whether he will be able to resist the temptation to exploit his new position to pursue his own obsessions and vendettas. Such outbursts are one thing coming from a Twitter user with a big following. He can also be puerile and vindictive, traits on display in 2018 when he accused a British cave-rescue expert, with no evidence, of being a “pedo guy”. He is clever, driven and ferociously hard-working. Shares in Tesla fell by 12% after news of the Twitter deal. The more time he devotes to Twitter, the less he will have for his other ventures. Thierry Breton, a senior EU official, noted that “It’s not rules that will apply here.” Mr Musk’s other investors are nervous. Australia, Britain, the EU and India, have all been working on tech-regulation.
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Mr Musk will not have an entirely free hand. It will be fascinating to see how easily it succumbs to engineering. Content moderation is the messy product of political and social pressures. Or perhaps Twitter could become an open platform, where different users may choose one of many different third-party algorithms-or none at all-according to their taste. A version less prone to pushing “engaging” content-which, in practice, often means tweets that are enraging, controversial or plain daft-could lower the temperature of the entire platform, making the job of moderation easier and possibly leading to debate that is more thoughtful. Researchers could examine it other programmers could tweak it. More significant, he thinks the cogs and ratchets of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, which decides which tweets a user sees, should be public. When in doubt, err on the side of leaving tweets up, not taking them down. He wants fewer outright bans and more temporary suspensions. The resulting fuss shows how illiberal much online opinion has become. He has already set out some ideas for Twitter, many of them cautious and sensible. The fact that Mr Musk is a billionaire should not disqualify him from owning an important media firm. That Mr Musk wants to be its agent is perhaps no surprise, for he cut his entrepreneurial teeth in the 1990s, when techno-libertarianism and anti-censorship were the internet’s animating ideas.
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It is a business model full of inconsistencies and unexamined trade-offs that looks ripe for disruption. Social media deploy algorithms to highlight “engaging” content, using a thicket of rules that try to mitigate the worst side-effects, the better to sell users to advertisers. Twitter fits the pattern of Tesla and SpaceX, offering Mr Musk another complex engineering system to tinker with, and a grand reason for doing so.
The question is whether his vision of free speech on Twitter is sensible. SpaceX’s ambition is so grandiose some commentators struggle to believe that Mr Musk is sincere: to establish a human presence on Mars, something that, were a catastrophe to befall Earth, might one day prove to have been an insurance policy for civilisation.Īssume that Mr Musk really is ready to spend billions of dollars of his own money to secure the “future of civilisation” (though he has a break clause should he get cold feet). Tesla’s purpose is to prod the world more quickly towards a carbon-free economy (a goal vindicated by the speed at which other carmakers are now pivoting to electric vehicles). Both firms were dismissed by bigger incumbents-until one day they weren’t.Īll that engineering and disruption is animated by Mr Musk’s own, sometimes idiosyncratic conception of the social good. SpaceX proved that a hungry, move-fast-and-break-things startup run on a relative shoestring could outperform aerospace giants grown cautious and fat on the back of generous government contracts. Tesla tore up the car industry’s rule book by replacing petrol with electricity, ditching dealerships and treating cars as computers.
Mr Musk, a passionate engineer, likes to take poorly performing technologies and improve them. But a closer look suggests his acquisition of Twitter fits his approach to business. At first blush, Mr Musk-best known for electric cars and reusable rockets-seems an unlikely social-media mogul.
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