The billionaire promises to make online speech freer. That is harder than it sounds
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskTwitter isn’t an obviously attractive business. With 217m daily users it is an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook, the world’s largest social network, and has slipped well behind the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Its share price has bumped along for years. It is like a modern-day Craigslist, writes Benedict Evans, a tech analyst: “Coasting on network effects, building nothing much, and getting unbundled piece by piece.
Mr Musk has said that in the name of transparency he will publish Twitter’s code, including its recommendation algorithm. He proposes to authenticate all users, which might help to reduce anonymous trolling, and vows to “defeat the spam bots”. He has mooted the idea of relying less on advertising, which provides 90% of Twitter’s revenue, and more on subscriptions, which would mean the firm could worry less about advertisers taking flight from contentious content.
The way Mr Musk runs his other businesses suggests that he may try to answer the content-moderation problem with automation. Tesla’s manufacturing processes are more automated than any other big carmaker. Social networks have found that artificial intelligence is good at spotting some banned content, particularly images. But it is bad at understanding context and irony, particularly in foreign languages .
If Twitter were to take a purist line on free speech, the immediate winners might therefore be its more censorious rivals, suggests Evelyn Douek, an expert on online speech at Harvard Law School. Until now, the main social networks have set roughly similar content-moderation policies, each reluctant to be an outlier. “You can imagine a Twitter with Trump back on its platform just being in the headlines all day, every day, while the other platforms sat back and ate their popcorn,” she says.
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