What could Musk’s purchase of Twitter mean for free speech?

Call it the $44 billion tweet. When the conservative news satire The Babylon Bee tweeted a joke that Twitter deemed offensive, it inadvertently triggered Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar bid to buy the social media platform, which the company has accepted. 

The backstory? USA Today had nominated Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as one of its Women of the Year. Ms. Levine is transgender. In response, The Babylon Bee – whose motto is “Fake news you can trust” – named Ms. Levine its Man of the Year. To some, The Babylon Bee’s riposte was an assertion of biological fact. To others, it was hate speech. Twitter suspended The Babylon Bee account in March. 

Mr. Musk, dismayed by Twitter’s decision, reached out to the Bee’s CEO. Shortly afterward, Mr. Musk initiated steps to buy Twitter outright. The entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX has also made a point of asserting that free speech should be Twitter’s governing principle. 

Mr. Musk’s proclamation sparked a backlash exemplified by Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who tweeted: “He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”

Mr. Musk’s bid to buy Twitter, which functions as a digital town square, has exposed a widening rift in the culture of free speech. On one side are institutional gatekeepers who favor top-down control of speech on social media, filtering out abhorrent rhetoric and false information that could sway how citizens vote. On the other side is Mr. Musk’s classical liberal vision for speech – once predominant in Silicon Valley, but no longer – which prizes competition within a marketplace of ideas.  

Both the far right and the far left increasingly favor top-down curbs on speech that they believe to be harmful and dangerous. The right favors legislative bans on content in school curricula and libraries. The left favors campus speech codes and prohibitions on hate speech, including on social media platforms. Twitter, a relatively small platform, wields outsize influence as a hub for journalists. MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan accused Mr. Musk of handing “one of the world’s most influential messaging machines” to the far right.

At the heart of the debate over Twitter’s model for content moderation lies a deeper question: Is it possible to engender greater trust in online information and discourse?

“What I think we have happening in society now is primarily that there is a new abundance of speech,” says Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. “The people who were not represented in mainstream mass media now have a seat at the table of the negotiation of norms in society. Those who held that table in their control resent that.”  

Similar battles have played out whenever a new technology, such as the Gutenberg printing press, enables speech that threatens established institutions. As another example, Mr. Jarvis cites the alarmed response of the newspaper industry to the advent of radio. Twitter, founded in 2006, hosts everything from sports to pornography to “Caturday” photos to, well, an account titled @BoredElonMusk that parodies the multibillionaire. (Sample tweet: “Do astronauts put their phone in spaceship mode?”)

“The Barbarians are at the Gate” 

But some believe that Twitter’s media and politics sector has been monopolized by institutional gatekeepers. The day after Mr. Musk offered to buy Twitter, he tweeted, “The Barbarians are at the Gate.” The platform – whose employees’ political donations were 98.7% for Democrats – has been accused of covertly suppressing the visibility of non-progressive viewpoints.

“I’m on the left, but I can see it,” says Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.” She recalls that Twitter once censored her tweet about a debate that Newsweek hosted on whether climate change is an emergency. “We weren’t even questioning, ‘Is climate change happening?’ Both sides admit that, of course, the climate is getting warmer. ... For asking whether it’s an emergency, we got censored.”

Twitter’s gatekeepers try to control everything from banned content (child pornography, for instance), to rooting out state disinformation (including in the war in Ukraine), to issuing credentials (to distinguish real accounts from fake or parody ones). But one of Twitter’s most controversial decisions apparently still rankles Mr. Musk. Several weeks prior to the 2020 election, Twitter suspended the New York Post for reporting on the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential nominee, that it alleged showed corrupt business deals in Ukraine and China. Most corporate news organizations and online platforms, including Facebook, believed that the computer was Russian disinformation aimed at skewing the election. This year, The New York Times tacitly verified the legitimacy of the laptop. At the time, Twitter defended its 16-day suspension by citing its policy against sharing hacked and private information. Last week, Mr. Musk tweeted, “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.” 

The multibillionaire has stated that, for Twitter to deserve trust, it must be politically neutral. The entrepreneur cites the First Amendment as a model he’d like to emulate. As for content moderation standards, Mr. Musk will have to contend with a new law in the European Union aimed at regulating harmful speech on social media. 

“People are not hearing Elon Musk’s outcries of free speech as an outcry for free speech,” says Karen Kovacs North, director of the Annenberg Program on Online Communities at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “People are hearing that Elon Musk is using the concept of free speech to allow people to come to Twitter and say things that have previously been stopped or controlled because they are hateful or hurtful in some way.”

Free speech or online bullying?

Although Twitter’s terms of service forbid glorification of violence, targeted harassment of individuals, or hateful conduct, the platform is still rife with abusive behavior.

“It’s still an environment where Black women, in particular, queer folk, differently abled folk, are already experiencing high levels of toxicity,” says André Brock, an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech and author of “Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.” “There will be an uptick in harassment, toxicity, misogyny, and racism, in part because many folk who had left the platform to go to spaces like Gab or Truth Social … [are] coming back to Twitter because they feel they won’t have to face the same consequences for their speech.”

Mr. Musk isn’t afraid to test the boundaries of taste and decorum on Twitter. He once compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler. Quick to mock “woke” viewpoints, he tweeted a meme that said, “Netflix waiting for the war to end to make a movie about a Black Ukraine guy falls in love with a transgender Russian.” He has also sparred with the Securities and Exchange Commission over what the agency claims are several instances of inaccurate information about Tesla that boosted the company’s stock prices. A judge ruled against his suit to have the consent decree removed just last week.

Ms. Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek is concerned that Mr. Musk may tamp down speech that interferes with his business interests, including Tesla’s ties to China. This year, Tesla opened a dealership in Xinjiang, China, despite widespread reports that the province has imprisoned Uyghur Muslims in “reeducation” camps. 

Another high-profile question: Given that Mr. Musk says he favors “timeouts” rather than permanent bans on Twitter, will Donald Trump be allowed back on his favorite bully pulpit? The former president was banned from Twitter “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Many on the progressive left argue that disinformation on Twitter is potentially dangerous and thus beyond the safe limits of acceptable speech. After all, Mr. Trump’s claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen through voting fraud fueled the angry crowd – which included white supremacists and QAnon conspiracy theorists – that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More recently, the platform has clamped down on COVID-19 misinformation that it believes is harmful to public health. For instance, feminist Naomi Wolf was ousted from Twitter following a series of tweets including the claim that mRNA vaccines are a software platform that can receive “uploads.”

Those types of views on matters such as public health “should be tamped down and it’s within the right and responsibility of a platform to do so,” says Mr. Jarvis. 

The battle to combat misinformation isn’t easy. If Twitter gets it wrong, it risks losing public trust. During the pandemic, Twitter censored heterodox views – from the hypothesis that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory to questions about the efficacy of cloth masks – that later became more widely accepted. Martin Kulldorff, a founder of the Great Barrington Declaration and former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, was temporarily suspended for claiming that vaccines are important for older, high-risk people but not for children. Indeed, Mr. Kulldorff says that Twitter has hosted misinformation disputing the effectiveness of natural immunity. Yet the scientist doesn’t believe that Twitter should censor erroneous views, because the scientific process necessarily involves argument. 

“What is the point of having people that you think are wrong or maybe even liars be given permission to share the same space in the public square with you? And the answer is, because you know what? He may be right or she may be right,” says Martin Gurri, author of “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” “The only way we find out what alternative possibilities there are to the world we’re interpreting is by hearing people that have radically different perspectives from ours.”

Times Square, not the NYT

Mr. Jarvis, for one, believes it’s time to shift discussion away from the bad content and concede that it’s always been present and always will be. 

“Twitter is not The New York Times. It’s Times Square,” says the media pundit and journalism professor. “If you walk through Times Square … you will hear smart people and stupid people. Right things, wrong things. We feel no compulsion to go through there and correct everything.”

If anything, Mr. Jarvis says that efforts to debunk bad speech only end up amplifying it. A better approach, in his view, would be to treat such speech as spam. Twitter allows one to curate what one sees and doesn’t see by muting or blocking other users. 

Even so, Twitter’s algorithms may amplify some content that some may object to. An internal study conducted by the company across a range of countries in 2020 found that its algorithm was biased toward recommending right-leaning political content. In a bid to boost public trust in Twitter, Mr. Musk says he is keen to allow transparency of its algorithms. 

Ultimately, efforts to restore a modicum of confidence in the institution may have to start at the top.

“Trust is a human thing, not a technological thing. I almost hesitate to use the word, but it’s almost a moral quality,” says Mr. Gurri. “You trust somebody who you think is good, somebody who’s not trying to fool you, or who is not trying to feather their own nest, or who’s not just an empty suit. ... To the extent that our elites learn to be, number one, good characters, and number two, project themselves as good characters in the digital world, trust will be restored.”