The $44 billion question

Elon Musk said he was going to change Twitter if he bought it. He bought it. Now he’s changing it. And Advertisers, regulators, and lawmakers have all warned him that he is on the wrong path.  

Is he? That’s the $44 billion question. How safe does social media actually have to be to be successful? How safe does social media have to be to keep the regulators at bay?

Okay, that’s two questions. I think we can have two questions for $44 billion.

Twitter hasn’t specifically said it will deprioritise safety. Musk has said it will prioritise free speech. In practice that means the bar for being banned, or having content removed for safety reasons is now higher – much higher. For the people, organisations and systems that are the targets of that content – things will be less safe.

So much trust and safety expertise has been lost from the organisation since privatisation that the only practical way to run Twitter is less safely. There are still moderation teams – but the experts that developed the community standards, rules and systems that supported them are gone. The experts that dealt with the complex fringe cases, and more devious adversaries? They’re gone.

With them also went countless relationships with the online safety community. Relationships that helped solve complex cases and tricky problems – especially those that spilled off Twitter, or onto it.

With all this talk about free speech, it is important to note that those teams existed to protect free speech. They worked to make users feel safe so that they could participate in public debate. The majority of tech platforms take this position. If people don’t feel safe to share their views – you do not, in practical terms, have free speech.

Many people do not believe social media companies should be the arbitrators of free speech. They argue that by definition, protecting speech means allowing people to say nearly anything they want, to anybody.

This is the analogue view of free speech. It predates the internet, and it needs to be adjusted for the practical reality of information technologies.

Of course, those trust and safety teams also worked to stay ahead of regulators that are increasingly showing a willingness to force tech companies to employ a greater duty of care to their users. Regardless of the new owners view on free speech, or mine – those regulators haven’t gone away.

Many of Twitters previous advertisers clearly don’t want to risk being seen to support the current approach. But it is hard to imagine the 240 million data profiled users being ignored for long. If the users stay, there will be people prepared to advertise.

Despite the surge in Mastodon registrations, its does seem that most Twitter users are taking a wait and see approach. After all, Twitter, despite how hard their trust and safety team worked, never actually achieved “safe” anyway. These platforms did enjoy rapid growth when they were less moderated and if Twitter starts to grow again, people won’t want to miss out.

The main difference between those times of rapid growth and today is that we now know the harm that unmoderated platforms can cause. We have seen people, organisations and even countries exploit these systems and cause harm. Even if many users are prepared to turn a blind eye, the majority of regulators and lawmakers won’t be able to.   

One things for sure with Elon Musk’s Twitter, we won’t have to wait long for our questions to be answered.