In one sense his turbulent stewardship of the social network has done the rest of the world a favour
’s two months running Twitter has been an unhappy experiment. The social network’s 250m users have endured a wearying saga in which Mr Musk is the central character. Advertisers have fled. Twitter, which lost $221m in 2021, is now on track to lose $4bn a year, by one estimate. The damage has spread to Tesla, Mr Musk’s carmaker, part of the reason it has lost half a trillion dollars in market value since early September, costing Mr Musk the title of the world’s richest man.
From the outside, Twitter seemed simple to someone whose day job was building self-driving cars and space rockets. Mr Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist”, had grown concerned that Twitter had been captured by censorious left-wing scolds. Shortly after agreeing to buy the platform he explained his approach to moderation: “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law.”
As well as limiting speech in the name of safety, Mr Musk has curtailed it to avoid the lesser sin of causing offence. In October the number of views of tweets that Twitter deems “hate speech” doubled, as users tested the limits of Mr Musk’s regime. Rather than allow this legal-but-nasty content, Twitter cracked down. In November hateful tweets recorded one-third fewer views than before the takeover.
All this holds two lessons for whoever follows Mr Musk as Twitter’s boss, should he leave. One is to keep content moderation at arm’s length. The person deciding whether a post is acceptable is compromised if they are also responsible for boosting engagement among users and spending by advertisers. Mark Zuckerberg realised this and outsourced Facebook’s moderation headaches to an independent “oversight board” in 2020.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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