Yesterday,
Elon Musk reached a deal to buy Twitter for $44
billion. The tech giant has over 217 million
users, including world leaders, celebrities, and
lawmakers. Twitter encourages daily public
discourse among its users, with its website explaining that the
platform “Serve the public conversation.” In
recent years, particularly amid the pandemic and
the 2020 election, Twitter has been more restrictive on what its
users can post on the platform, hoping to restrict
the flow of misinformation on the site. Twitter
has also taken a more proactive approach to
content moderation, flagging misleading tweets and
tweets that may contain mis-, dis-, or
mal-information.
Musk has over 84 million followers
on Twitter and is a self-described “Free Speech
Abolitionist”. He argues that free speech is
essential to the function of democracy and twitter
is the digital town square by which citizens can
have open debate. He has also pledged to make
Twitter’s algorithm open source to increase user
trust, remove the spam bots from the platform, and
decrease the company’s financial dependency on Ad
revenue.
Despite
Musk’s promises to loosen the rules of engagement
on Twitter, many have pointed out that these
changes may open the door for hate
speech and disinformation to spread
without safeguards. “Mr. Musk: free speech is
wonderful, hate speech is unacceptable.
Disinformation, misinformation and hate speech
have NO PLACE on Twitter,” the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), a US civil rights advocacy group, warned
in a statement.
Political
activists expect that support for Musk’s
acquisition of twitter will be split between party
lines. Already, many conservatives have welcomed
Musk’s twitter but Democrats have slammed it as a
sign that more is needed to be done to rein in Big
Tech.
Learn
more from NPR HERE
Read
more from WSJ HERE
Authored
by Lianna
Brown & Luke
Englebert
