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Credit to Author: Gilad Edelman| Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2022 21:17:51 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Gilad Edelman<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n The saga of<\/span> Elon Musk attempting to take over Twitter began, appropriately, on Twitter. In late March, Musk tweeted, \u201cGiven that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?\u201d<\/p>\n We now know Musk\u2019s answer. Not long after his tweet, an SEC filing revealed he had quietly become Twitter\u2019s largest shareholder. And on Wednesday, he sent a letter to Twitter\u2019s board chair declaring his intention to buy the company<\/a> for about $43 billion and take it private. His goal, he wrote, is to help Twitter realize its \u201cpotential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n Musk was vague about what free speech means to him, but his moves appeared to be about loosening Twitter\u2019s content moderation policies. In a live interview at this year\u2019s TED conference on Thursday, he basically confirmed those suspicions. When asked whether a Musk-owned Twitter would prohibit any content, he replied, \u201cI think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. There are some limitations on free speech in the US, and of course Twitter would have to abide by those.\u201d<\/p>\n If this is really Musk\u2019s plan, it\u2019s terrible news. The First Amendment permits all kinds of horrible speech that most people don\u2019t want to see in their social feeds. Allowing any legal speech would mean opening up Twitter to explicit racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, advocacy of violence, and worse. If this isn\u2019t<\/em> really his intent, his comments are still terrible news: It means he has spent close to zero time thinking seriously about free speech before attempting to buy Twitter in the name of free speech.<\/p>\n Musk is on firmer ground, however, when he calls Twitter a de facto public square. Not everyone thinks so. On my feed, at least, that claim has drawn a fair bit of mockery. Some people have pointed out that Twitter is a private company, not the government, and so can do what it wants. Others have argued that Twitter can\u2019t be the public square because most of the public doesn\u2019t even use it. Twitter is far smaller than other social platforms. It has only around 200 million daily active users worldwide and around 37 million<\/a> in the US. Compare that to around 2 billion active users for Facebook and YouTube and more than a billion for TikTok. Nor does Twitter have the kind of quasi-governmental market power of the biggest tech giants. Meta\u2019s current market cap is about $575 billion\u2014a precipitous fall from last year, when it cleared $1 trillion, but still out of reach for even the world\u2019s richest person. TikTok\u2019s parent company has been valued<\/a> at $250 billion. Next to those numbers, Twitter looks like small potatoes.<\/p>\n And yet Musk is onto something. A platform\u2019s importance to democracy isn\u2019t purely a function of its size or even its popularity. Twitter may not be the biggest social network, but, at least in the US, it\u2019s the most politically significant. (This is probably less true internationally. The US remains Twitter\u2019s biggest market.) Its relatively small user base is composed disproportionately of people who influence politics and culture. It\u2019s where journalists, politicians, academics, and other \u201celites\u201d spend tons of time. It\u2019s where they get news and workshop their takes. It is, after all, where Musk\u2014the world\u2019s richest person\u2014chooses to express himself. If you want to influence public opinion, you don\u2019t post on Facebook. You tweet.<\/p>\n Consider the case of Jennifer Sey, the former Levi\u2019s executive<\/a> who lost both her job and a shot at becoming CEO because she refused to stop her outspoken advocacy for reopening public schools during the pandemic. I recently asked Sey why she didn\u2019t simply refrain from tweeting. She told me that, first of all, she didn\u2019t just tweet. She organized rallies and wrote op-eds. She appeared on Laura Ingraham\u2019s Fox News show to discuss her decision to move to Denver so her youngest child could enroll in in-person school. But Twitter was the killer app.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what enabled me to get invited to the mayor\u2019s office,\u201d she said of her tweets on the subject. \u201cTwitter might not be the biggest social media platform, but it is where journalists are, it is where influencers are connecting with each other. So I was invited to conversations that I thought could make a difference. And that was because of Twitter. That doesn't happen on Facebook. The whole thing with Fox happened because of Twitter. I had tweeted that we were moving to Denver, I think Jake Tapper retweeted it, it got picked up. That doesn\u2019t happen on other platforms.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPublic square\u201d may not be a perfect term for this, as the legal scholar Mary Anne Franks has written<\/a>. But whatever you call it, it\u2019s hard to deny that Twitter is the place to be if you want to be heard by people with power. This means access to Twitter has become an oddly crucial tool if you want to participate fully in democratic life\u2014by most accounts, the reason the right to free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment.<\/p>\n This is extremely unhealthy. Treating Twitter as a gauge of public opinion leads political figures to take unpopular positions<\/a> favored by loud online activists, accelerating political polarization. And it warps media organizations\u2019 baseline sense of what people believe and care about. A comment that goes viral on Twitter might have tens of thousands of retweets. That looks like a lot but is actually a tiny, nonrepresentative sample of the population. (Plus, some unknown share of those retweets probably came from bot accounts.) Even if the user base looked more like society overall, Twitter is driven by an engagement-based algorithmic feed that rewards outrage, sensationalism, and virality, all in the service of selling ads\u2014meaning what you see there is not the product of some organic deliberative process. Those same design features hack the brains of media and political elites, as well, too often leading them to behave like assholes in public in pursuit of attention and engagement.<\/p>\n Will any of this change if Musk\u2019s hostile takeover succeeds? Probably not. During the TED interview, along with his suggestion about allowing all legal speech, Musk made the more sensible argument that Twitter\u2019s ranking algorithms and enforcement decisions should be public and transparent. His stated view is that, given Twitter\u2019s importance, \u201cHaving a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n But perhaps the real problem is that Twitter is so influential in the first place. Here, neither Twitter nor Musk is to blame. We journalists are. It\u2019s the media\u2019s fixation with Twitter that drives its political importance, because getting attention on Twitter is a shortcut to getting press attention, which all politicians\u2014and some eccentric billionaires\u2014covet.<\/p>\n How did we get here? Over the past decade, practically everyone in media came to feel that they had to be on Twitter. It seemed essential for promoting stories and reaching audiences. Over the years, this has grown into an unhealthy addiction for some individual journalists (guilty!) and the field at large. Reporters and editors often have a green light to waste time scrolling through social media during work hours, since one never knows when something important will appear in the feed. Whole stories are based on trends observed on Twitter. A viral tweet is used as evidence of popular sentiment. Some under-resourced newsrooms lean on Twitter feeds as a cheaper, faster substitute for deeper reporting. And some of us mistake Twitter engagement for journalistic impact\u2014even though Twitter drives far fewer readers to stories than Facebook or Google search.<\/p>\n The good news is that there are some signs the profession is nearing a moment of clarity. Washington Post<\/em> columnist Megan McArdle has argued<\/a> that the way to fix what Twitter has done to public discourse is \u201cfor major institutions in the media and think-tank world to tell their employees to get the hell off Twitter.\u201d Recently, New York Times<\/em> executive editor Dean Baquet issued a memo<\/a> to staff informing them that they are not required to have a Twitter presence and urging them to spend less time on the platform. That\u2019s an important signal because unilaterally withdrawing from social media is not really an option for journalists lower down the totem pole.<\/p>\n Twitter\u2019s board may not accept Musk\u2019s bid. The fact that it\u2019s even a possibility, however, is deeply alarming. One man shouldn\u2019t have so much power over the public square. Luckily, there\u2019s nothing inevitable about Twitter playing that role. Perhaps Musk\u2019s takeover bid will prompt the media to rethink its dependence on a for-profit social platform that doesn\u2019t necessarily have the public interest at heart. If that happens, Musk really will have followed through on his promise to strengthen democracy\u2014just not in the way he imagined.<\/p>\n