It will be a scary place.
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The notion of a town square, where citizens could air their grievances, make decrees or post fliers, seems antiquated and delightfully quaint in the age of Facebook and Twitter. Today, it's remarkably simple to broadcast a message from a seat in your basement to a much wider audience than a town square would ever afford. But it's also just as easy to be drowned out by a sea of voices online and to have your virtual flyer papered over a hundred times. |
There is a lively, and perhaps intractable, debate about what free speech ought to mean on the web — distinct from the government's guarantee in the First Amendment — and what role social media ought to play in moderating which opinions and images are allowed on their platforms. Facebook and its ilk have for years battled bad actors who take advantage of the sites' blind spots to make hateful or ghastly posts, designed to shock and inflame. |
It's in that context that billionaire Elon Musk arrives at the helm of Twitter after compelling the company to sell itself to him for about $44 billion and take it private. As sole owner, he's promised a lighter touch on moderating posts in the name of free speech, which caused me to consider what his track record suggests about the direction Twitter may be headed. |
As I detailed in an editorial this week, I have some concerns. "Loosening content moderation, as Mr. Musk appears poised to do, won't make Twitter a better place; that will make it far more toxic," I wrote. |
And Musk himself, the world's richest man, has used Twitter to berate critics, peddle risky cryptocurrencies, promote unproven Covid treatments and to make sophomoric jokes about women's bodies. Those are all, of course, viewpoints permissible to be broadcast under any interpretation of free speech guarantees. But the question remains if that's the type of leader under which Twitter — the "de facto town square," as Musk called it — is best served.
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