On May 28th, two very online know-it-alls got into a tiff on Twitter. The writer Matt Yglesias posted an article from El País about how Twitter, during Elon Musk’s tenure as its C.E.O., has complied with an alarmingly high number of censorious takedown requests from authoritarian governments. “I’m a free speech absolutist,” Yglesias wrote, parroting one of Musk’s oft-repeated mantras. “I, personally, would not censor Slow Boring”—Yglesias’s Substack newsletter—“at the request of foreign authoritarian governments even if that cost me some money.” Musk soon replied, “You’re such a numbskull. Please point out where we had an actual choice and we will reverse it.”
The numbskull actually had a point. The requests in question “all involve a government asking Twitter to either remove content or reveal information about a user,” according to a report from Rest of World, the publication that analyzed the data. Prior to Musk’s purchase, Twitter had often pushed back on such requests, and sometimes refused to comply with them at all. As a result, the company had faced bans and fought takedown requests in court. Musk explained his new approach to free speech after Twitter removed content related to a BBC documentary that was critical of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi: “We can’t go beyond the laws of a country.” A year earlier, he had tweeted, “If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
Despite a widespread irritation with the Musk discourse, it’s worth considering what effects Musk’s comfort with acceding to the desires of strongmen could have on the political climate in the U.S. Even though usage of the site is down, Twitter remains one of the more high-profile communication platforms in the world. And Musk seems to rule it by fiat or something close to it; he recently announced the hiring of Linda Yaccarino, an advertising executive, to serve as C.E.O., an indication that he has at least some interest in reassuring nervous advertisers that the platform isn’t too unpredictable. Though he might be a genius inventor, it’s unclear how much deep thinking Musk—who grew up in authoritarian, racially segregated South Africa—has done about those inalienable rights to speech which liberal democracies have been banging on about for a couple hundred years.
What seems most evident is that Twitter is becoming more friendly to the right wing. Tucker Carlson just launched his new show on the platform; the Daily Wire’s network of podcasts has made Twitter a new streaming home; and Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, chose a Musk-brokered Twitter forum to announce his Presidential campaign. The event was plagued by technical difficulties, which overshadowed the weirdness of the format: Musk, with a mumbling offhandedness, basically announced DeSantis’s intention to run before the Governor could even get a word in edgewise. Musk’s own interests—an obsession with media bias, conspiracy, anti-trans provocation, and the corrosive nature of “wokeness”—seem to align with DeSantis’s, though Musk would like us to believe that his platform won’t absorb those biases. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” Musk said last year. He’s certainly made those on the right feel more at home, but he’s done so at the cost of the site’s traditional base of users.
Musk’s personal political leanings and his cultivation of right-wing voices wouldn’t matter as much if he hadn’t demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for pettiness. Naked displays of insecurity are typically welcome and hilarious in billionaires—see: Jeff Bezos’s five-hundred-million-dollar yacht with a busty mermaid figurehead that looks an awful lot like his new fiancée—but Musk has a taste for personal vendetta that runs from the benign (cancelling a customer’s Tesla order because he didn’t like the guy’s blog review of a company event) to the malignant (trying to get a lawyer who interviewed Musk during an S.E.C. investigation fired from his position in private practice). The malignant pettiness has only grown since his acquisition of Twitter. In December, Musk removed several journalists’ Twitter accounts after they wrote about or linked to an account that shared publicly available information about his private-jet usage. This instinct to censor those with whom he disagrees—a sort of personal autocracy—coupled with the alarming news about Twitter’s enthusiastic compliance with takedown requests from governments, should raise some alarms about what limits on political speech could come during the 2024 cycle. Could Musk put his thumb on the scale for Republicans?
The Twitter Files—Musk’s opening of Twitter’s internal archive to a select group of mostly opinion journalists—purported to show a liberal bias in the company’s content moderation, but a recent Rolling Stone piece pointed out that there was a bipartisan proclivity to work the Twitter refs behind the scenes. The story reports an instance where the Trump White House asked that a tweet from the model Chrissy Teigen, calling Trump “a pussy ass bitch,” be taken down. (It wasn’t.) Back then, Twitter’s content moderation was spread out over a team of people who, the Twitter Files show, engaged in debate over what should be taken down and why. Since taking over, Musk laid off much of that team—he seemed to endorse a tweet that falsely suggested that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, was sympathetic to pedophilia, after which Roth was threatened and forced to flee his home—apparently reneged on a promise to form a content-moderation council, and has, for reasons that remain unclear, made Twitter’s takedown reporting more opaque. Lumen, a database that tracks social-media companies’ public disclosures of takedown requests, reported that as of April 15th, Twitter has stopped sharing the data. Earlier this month, after Twitter decided that an anti-trans film produced by the Daily Wire shouldn’t be promoted, Musk tweeted that the decision was “a mistake by many people at Twitter. It is definitely allowed.” The company’s new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned the same day.
Given this lack of clear content moderation and Musk’s legendary capriciousness, it’s not particularly difficult to imagine a 2024 campaign scenario in which Republican candidates and causes receive deferential treatment when it comes to takedown requests that claim disinformation or defamation. Even without that layer of potential complexity, Twitter usage now means dealing with a certain level of unpredictability that political actors—campaigns or otherwise—might find unsettling. Take Musk’s decision to label news organizations such as NPR, PBS, and the BBC as state-affiliated—only to walk it back on the advice of his biographer, Walter Isaacson. Twitter, which once made propaganda posts by autocratic governments like Russia, China, and Iran harder to find, has lifted such guardrails. “All news is to some degree propaganda,” Musk tweeted, about the decision to remove so-called visibility filtering. “Let people decide for themselves.”
Musk’s prominence is, in many ways, a continuation of the personality politics that was popularized when Donald Trump ran for President. Though Twitter was never a bastion of admirable civic discourse during the Trump years, at least it was regularly filled with sharp arguments; now that it’s run by a man who revels in ad hominem attacks (and attention), the chatter on the app is just a lot dumber. And, unlike Trump, Musk’s incessant desire for clicks and controversy carries a significant downside. Trump was a national joke who suddenly found himself being taken seriously; Musk is only lately a national joke, having fallen from great heights of seriousness. With Tesla’s stock price recently tanking and Twitter flailing, it’s unclear whether there will be a pile of money to cushion his landing. ♦
