Twitter Moves From Moderation to Free Speech And Back Again

Photo by chriscorneschi via Flickr

If you’re a Twitter user, at this point it probably seems like Elon Musk has been running the company for almost forever. In reality, Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media company closed on October 27, less than two months ago. Musk cited free speech concerns as a reason for purchasing Twitter but often free speech seems to have taken a backseat in his erratic reign. That was the case this week as Twitter summarily suspended a number of journalistic accounts that were critical of Twitter’s new head honcho.

Over the past few days, Twitter first banned an account that provided tracking information for Musk’s private jet. At the same time, the company also banned the personal account of Jack Sweeney, 20, the user who tweeted the location of Musk’s plane.

The ban may have been precipitated by an incident in Los Angeles where Musk claims that a car carrying his son was assaulted by a stalker. There seems to be no evidence that the attack was related to Sweeney, the assault was on a car rather than a plane, but the BBC reports that Twitter’s media policy was updated to prohibit posting personal information such as real-time locations “without their express authorization and permission.”

Musk has blocked his information from some sites but not others. Sweeney’s tracking accounts are still active on Instagram and Facebook using this public, unblocked data as I write this.

Shortly after banning Sweeney’s accounts, Twitter banned several prominent journalists from the site. CNN reports that CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, and independent journalist Aaron Rupar are among the accounts that have been recently suspended. Some of the accounts appear to be suspended permanently while others are temporarily banned.

In a series of tweets, Musk claimed that the suspensions were related to “doxxing real-time location info,” but none of the suspended journalistic accounts seem to have done so. Shortly after taking the helm of the company, Musk pledged not to ban the account following his plane even though it represented a risk to his personal safety.

The wave of suspensions comes only a few days after Musk’s release of the so-called “Twitter files,” messages between Twitter employees that relate to suspensions under the previous Twitter regime of Jack Dorsey and alleged collusion with the government to hush up a news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. The uncomfortable truth here is that Twitter seems to have acted within its rights and broken no laws, even if Musk and others disagree with the company’s actions. Government collusion to suppress the story, while not proven, would have to be laid at the feet of the Trump Administration, which was in power at the time.

More to the point, a week ago, Elon Musk was attacking closed-door decisions to ban accounts for what amounts to exercising free speech. This week, it is Musk himself who is banning accounts for opaque and dishonest reasons. In his recent actions, Musk seems to be engaging in ex post facto rulemaking in which he retroactively punishes accounts for activity that was permissible when posted.

Maybe these are reasonable actions on both sides. It’s understandable for a father to get defensive when his child is threatened. On the other hand, when a president uses a platform to provoke a riot and launch a coup attempt, maybe that merits a response as well, even if Twitter’s community standards didn’t expressly prohibit spreading lies to incite an insurrection. To put it another, way:

The big difference is that Donald Trump and many of the other accounts banned in connection with January 6 were advocating political violence against their fellow Americans and the government. The accounts banned by Musk simply followed his aircraft’s location and may or may not have been an indirect link to a stalker harassing his son.

What about the accounts suspended before January 6? There are too many to assess individually, but I think that most probably were in violation of Twitter rules. In many cases, it seems that users on the right weren’t just outraged that radical voices on the right were being silenced, but that radical voices on the left were not.

It wasn’t a question of having rules. It was that the rules weren’t being evenly applied.

At one point, I became a victim of overzealous censors or algorithms myself. In March 2021, a Facebook page that I had operated for years was unpublished due to violations of “community standards.” I had always tried to run a clean, civil page and it wasn’t clear what standards I had violated, but I realized that it was up to Facebook to determine what to allow on its platform.

In the aftermath of that incident, I suggested that the free market be allowed to fix Facebook rather than relying on government regulation. For a time, it seemed that Elon Musk might be taking that advice to heart with his acquisition of Twitter.

That may be how it started, but how it’s going is that Musk’s reign has become a cautionary tale about good intentions and the corrupting influence of absolute power. Rather than being a champion of free speech, Musk is acting like an authoritarian with his increasingly arbitrary restrictions on speech.

But that’s okay. Twitter is still a private company. The First Amendment does not prohibit private organizations from censoring content on their own platforms.

It does, however, make Musk a hypocrite.

Maybe he just learned over two months and $44 billion that moderating social media content is not as easy as it seems. The partisan positions now seem to be reversed as the right applauds Musk’s crackdown and the left decries it.

The bottom line is that both sides are implicitly agreeing that unfettered free speech on the internet is not the best option. These sites need to have content moderation and enforcement of rules to protect the platform’s civility and decency. These rules need to be clear and evenly applied.

It does seem that Musk’s backers should be concerned. Users and advertisers are fleeing Twitter as it becomes more like Truth Social or Parler (complete with QAnon-adjacent posts by the Twitterer-in-chief). Tesla stock, which Musk reportedly used to finance the Twitter deal, has also tanked since October, dealing a blow to Musk’s net worth.

But in the end, the free market may still provide the answer. As Twitter declines, a number of other platforms are vying for the position of its potential replacement. Among these are Post, Mastodon, and Counter Social. I have created accounts on all three although I’m not active yet, and I’m not sure which, if any, will ultimately be my favorite. Just look for @captainkudzu.

And I’m still on Twitter with the same user name as well unless this gets me banned.