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Social media security experts and outside experts, who have spent years trying to slow the empowerment of tyrants and violent mobs from Facebook and other platforms, are horrified that a second large company could be controlled by just one person – especially this one. who complains that Twitter places too many restrictions on what can be posted on its site.
In tweets and a TED talk that followed his surprise offer to make Twitter private last week, billionaire Elon Musk condemned decisions to ban some users as censorship, saying moderation dulled the spread of legal but offensive content as it goes too far.
“If it’s a gray area, let the tweet exist,” Musk said Thursday.
Such comments worry those whose experience is that unrestricted speech makes social media platforms unusable and that lightly controlled speech favors those who can direct thousands to make versions of the same point, which is then amplified by algorithms designed to maximize commitment and thus to advertise dollars.
“It’s a disaster, and it’s not just Elon Musk, but he’s kind of putting it on steroids,” said Shoshana Zuboff, a retired professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Observation Capitalism, who said the money was coming. from the collection of data on human behavior is the lifeblood of a new and hitherto almost unregulated era.
Zuboff’s work claims that Facebook, Twitter and others extract as much data as possible about users and then try to maximize their time on the site because it makes them money. But the platforms, she said, are not neutral – by boosting consumers’ online interests, they change not only discussions but also beliefs and even physical actions, encouraging people to do what they would not otherwise do, such as join protests in the real world.
Billionaire Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, offered to buy Twitter on April 13 for $ 54.20 per share. (Video: Reuters)
Putting so much power in the hands of a company is bad enough – but putting it in the hands of one person, as is largely the case with Facebook’s controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg, and it would be the case with Musk-owned Twitter – It would be, she says, incompatible with democracy.
“There are simply no checks and balances from internal or external forces,” Zuboff said in an interview. That would leave Musk, like Zuckerberg, in quantity collected data on people and the ability to use them to manipulate, “which cannot be compared to anything that has ever existed and allows interference with the integrity of individual behavior as well as the integrity of collective behavior.”
“Zuckerberg sits in front of his celestial keyboard and can decide day after day, hour by hour, whether people will be more or less angry, whether the publications will live or die,” she said. „С anti-vax, we have seen that the same power of Mr. Zuckerberg can be applied to life and death. “
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment. Musk did not answer questions sent by email.
Zuckerberg at least has a board of directors and a Securities and Exchange Commission to look after the interests of shareholders. Private Twitter wouldn’t even have that.
Zuboff believes that in the next decade, completely new institutions must come to life in order to manage the information space.
Behind the controversy over Musk’s candidacy is a long-running debate over whether technology executives already have too much control over online speech.
If Musk takes control of Twitter, it could increase pressure on US politicians to regulate social media companies, former employees told The Post.
A person with “almost monopoly control” over social media can only heighten these concerns among politicians, said Bill Bayer, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, who previously led antitrust enforcement at both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Labor. justice.
“Having one person who is an unpredictable commodity – to put it mildly – to control such an important communication platform is likely to upset many people,” Bayer said.
In interviews, former Democratic regulators and antitrust advocates said Musk’s candidacy for Twitter underscored the need for Congress to pass legislation governing the Internet. Tom Wheeler, a former Democrat chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said Musk’s actions underscore the need to create a new regulator to monitor the technology industry.
“What we need is a process that respects the First Amendment, in which the government does not dictate content, but makes an acceptable code of conduct,” he said.
Even professionals who think social media is pure good say Twitter, as Musk imagines, would be terrible for consumers and investors.
The last few years have led to a large number of fakes on Twitter serving those who feel frozen from the original, including Gab and Parler, but none have appeared in the mass stream.
This is no coincidence, said Alicia Wonles, director of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace Partnership for Counteraction to Influence. People want basic rules in the same way they would avoid a nightclub that closes its eyes to accidental violence.
“Musk may buy Twitter and try to bring it back to some nostalgic lost Eden from the early days of the Internet, but platforms with the lowest community standards, such as Gab, are unlikely to rank because it’s not good business.” said Wonles.
Eva Galperin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who helped protect global rights activists from government hacking and ordinary people from domestic harassment, said she would “be concerned about the human rights and impact on the personal safety of any individual who has full control over Twitter’s policies.” I am particularly concerned about the impact of full ownership by a person who has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not understand the realities of content moderation on a large scale. “
Referring to Musk’s support for allowing something legal, she added: “Twitter content moderation practices leave much to be desired, but they have tried policies that Musk seems to prefer more than a decade ago and have not worked.
Moderate withdrawal would be disproportionately harmful to women, minorities and anyone who is not in favor of the establishment, civil rights activists said.
“Without traffic rules, we will be in danger,” said Rashad Robinson, president of the Color of Change racial justice group. “Our defense cannot meet the whims of billionaires.”
Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer of Facebook, who called for Russian disinformation on the platform during the 2016 election, said Musk’s view of Twitter as a public space for free expression was detached from the reality of many people and not has admitted that it will give more power to the most powerful.
Without moderation, Stamos said, “anyone who expresses an opinion ends up in any form of accidental insult, ranging from death and threats of rape. This is the basis of the network. If you want people to be able to interact, you have to have basic rules. ”
“When you talk about a public square, it’s a wrong analogy. In this case, the town square on Twitter includes hundreds of millions of people who can interact pseudo-anonymously from hundreds of miles away. A Russian troll farm can come up with hundreds of people to show off in the town square.
“The algorithm decides who will be heard,” added Claire Wardle, a professor at Brown University who studies disinformation and social media moderation policies.
For Wardle Musk, it sounds as if it spoke before 2016, when the scale of foreign disinformation campaigns shocked both consumers and experts and accelerated more sophisticated moderation efforts that even now do not reach their goals.
“We were just so naive because we didn’t understand the way these platforms were arming themselves,” Wardle said. “The idea of going back to where we were is a disaster.”
But that fits in with a well-documented disregard for regulators and regulators by the developer, whether they affect labor, car safety or the stock market, critics say.
Some Republicans have applauded Musk as part of their argument that Twitter, the first platform to ban Donald Trump since the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, is unfair to conservatives.
But a successful takeover may make new regulation more likely than Washington amid broader efforts to master the big technology companies. “Consolidating control is not the way to defend democracy and strengthen free expression,” said Samir Jain, director of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “This will only exacerbate people’s concerns about the extent to which these companies are influencing our discourse.”
If Twitter goes private, its policies and decisions will become less transparent to politicians and the general public, which will pose additional challenges to tackling the role of technology companies, Bayer said.
Over the past year, Facebook whistleblowers have filed complaints with the SEC, alleging that the company has misled investors about its efforts to tackle misinformation and accounts linked to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. But such challenges would not be possible on Twitter if the platform was privately controlled.
“There will be less public disclosure, there will be less independent oversight,” Bayer said. “It would not be possible for independent board directors or individual shareholders to challenge or shape Twitter’s behavior if it was held by only one person.
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