18 years ago today, on July 15th, 2006, Twitter was officially launched to the public. The company saw its prominence in 2016 after the election of President Donald Trump, an outspoken user who boosted the platform via his use of Twitter to develop policy decisions, administrations, and announcement campaigns.
Historically, American politicians and Presidents understood the importance of communicating directly with their people. From Lincoln’s master debates and Teddy Roosevelt’s telegraphs to JFK and Reagan’s national television broadcasts, the locomotive of communication has now become Twitter, which under its pivot to Elon Musk, sees its new age of change and globalization.
Musk’s incentives
In late April of 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion. Johnny Harris, independent journalist and filmmaker, in his recent autobiographic video of Musk, summarizes Musk’s motives to buy Twitter into three sections: to eliminate liberal bias, government censorship of social media, and advocate free speech,
Ostensibly for Musk, Twitter’s headquarters being in the heart of liberal downtown San Francisco meant that engineers and leaders of the platform were suppressed and elevated by the city’s politics.
Twitter is “an accidental far left information weapon that was then harnessed by the far left, who could not themselves create the weapon, but happened to be co-located where the technologists were,” Musk exclaims in an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, adding that “Twitter was simply an arm of the government” and a “state publication.”
However, hard evidence seems to clash with Musk’s concerns. In the case of Musk fearing Twitter being a leftist weapon, a 2021 study by Stanford University’s Department of Political Science suggested otherwise, revealing that the old Twitter saw “the mainstream political right enjoy[ing] higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left” in “6 out of 7 countries studied.” In addition, the study emphasized that Twitter actually “doesn’t amplify far-left and far-right political groups more than moderate ones: contrary to prevailing public beliefs.”
Musk’s paranoia of government censorship transparency also doesn’t seem to improve and instead has exacerbated. While both the Biden Administration and The Trump White House have required the intense censorship of tweets, as in the case of Hunter of a New York Post Article on Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Twitter’s full compliance rate after Musk hovered over 80% — a significant rise compared to a 50% rate before Musk.
For example, when India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi requested to censor a BBC documentary critical of the leader, Twitter agreed and “blocked more than 120 accounts, including Canadian politicians, poets, several journalists, and an Indian MP.”
Recently, the president of Turkey successfully pressured Twitter to block the accounts of his vocal critics under the veil of looming Türkiye presidential elections. However, the same requests were actively resisted by Twitter in 2014, firing back that “political speech is among the most important speech, especially when it concerns possible government corruption.” In fact, Twitter’s previous annual report for censorship reasonings and analysis stopped publishing data as of April 2022, complicating Musk’s position in advocating transparency.
Of course, Musk’s concerns may extend beyond censorship into maintaining relationships and markets for his other companies (e.g. Tesla, SpaceX).
Free speech under Musk
Aside from arguable failures to address censorship and liberal biases, is Musk truly fulfilling his plan to make the platform “better than ever” through “enhancing free speech?”
The answer is complex.
After firing most of Twitter’s old employees, Musk reinstates big accounts that were previously banned for spreading election-related and COVID-19 misinformation. This included lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andrew Tate, former president Donald Trump, and many more. As expected, tweet spam on COVID-19 vaccine doubts, election fraud, and QAnon conspiracies began to rise once again after these users’ reinstatement.
Around February’s Superbowl, Musk called an urgent meeting, tasking 80 engineers to rebuild a version of the platform’s algorithm to artificially boost the popularity of his tweets after his ‘Go @Eagles’ post got less engagement by the tweet of similar information by President Joe Biden.
Ironically, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” seems be to using an artificially amplified voice to reinstate a very specific type of voice on Twitter, amplifying not just diversity but extreme and harmful ideas.
Many were perplexed by Musk’s decisions; Even Elon’s biggest ‘fanboy’ Bill Maher questions Musk in an interview, asking “Why then embrace the worst people on ?” after being asked about the platform.
Interestingly, such reinstatements were not consistent. When Alex Jones, a prominent far-right conspiracy theorist who spreads misinformation regularly, asked to re-enter the platform, Musk refused, tweeting “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.” Regardless, Jones was reinstated shortly after a public vote, suggesting Twitter may now only be able to function under the emotional investments of Musk in the issues he takes personal interests in.
Following reinstatements, Musk then declares the term ‘cisgender’ as a slur on Twitter, threatening to ban anyone using the term. Musk also starts suing media watchdog organizations, like the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), silencing them for criticizing the new Twitter. Expectedly, Musk lost the lawsuit, with the verdict concluding it was an attempt to “silence criticism and deter others from criticizing his company.”
Musk went on to ban critical journalists, though he did reinstate a few of them after a public vote. These suspensions “included reporters from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.” Following the bans, CNN accuses Must as “no free speech warrior” in their article titled “Elon Musk censors the press.” Additionally, the bans included suppressing ‘Substack’ links — a platform where independent journalists publish — by refusing users to comment, like, or embed tweets that had any relation to Substack articles.
When Twitter users organized a protest against making users pay for their accounts to be “verified,” an act that became known as the Blue Check Apocalypse, Twitter called out organizers for violating rules on “platform manipulation and spam.”
Reflecting on Twitter’s current position in mass media timesquare, we can observe new prevailing trends with the continued evolvement of technology, politics, and society. Will there ever be free speech absolutism? What are the consequences? However, ambitions to amplify free speech will palpably involve complex and conflicting routes that may challenge or even prove impossible for Musk or anyone else to maneuver.
Written by Julia Jiang
