When Elon Musk announced his hostile takeover bid for Twitter, offering to buy it for at the time far more than its market price, one wondered why a “smart” guy like him would be doing this, especially when he tried to back out of the deal. But it isn’t really that hard to figure out: Musk has a history of politically-incorrect commentary, including COVID-denial, and he disapproved of Twitter banning people for conspiracy commentary that he might secretly believe himself. Besides, if people like Trump were allowed to remain on Twitter to promoting dangerous misinformation and inciting violence, that provided a high enough ceiling for his own crackpot political ideas. For example, Musk made news recently for suggesting a “peace plan” to end the war in Ukraine that most people derided as Kremlin propaganda.
Following his official takeover of Twitter, Musk fired three executives, including Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, who had the thankless job of trying to “police” the platform, which ultimately involved banning people like Trump and musician Kanye West, the latter who is also known for making bizarre commentary that he has a difficult time explaining or justifying. People currently permanently banned include Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones and Michael Flynn. Musk has stated he doesn’t believe in “permanent” bans, so it remains to be seen what he will do with the accounts of these people, all far-right extremists posing a danger to civil society.
Perhaps Musk has a “soft spot” for musicians, since he must think “fair is fair” when he ordered the reinstatement of West. Courtney Love, who many people believe is deranged—a person I once encountered late one night in an old Tower Records store in the University District studying the magazine rack, looking like she just woke up from sleeping in the rain—and still not entirely "cleared" in the alleged suicide of Kurt Cobain, was banned after an insane Twitter rampage in 2009 against a fashion designer as revealed in this complaint...
abcnews.go.com/images/Entertainment/courtney_love_lawsuit_090331.pdf
...and was eventually forced to pay $430,000 in damages to Dawn Simorangkir. Although her original twitter account remains off-line, Love has been permitted to open a new account with a different name.
Note that Twitter itself was not held responsible for allowing Love a public platform for her actions. It is far from clear what exactly Musk intends to do when he claims he wants to keep Twitter open-up as a “peaceful” place to exchange ideas. But without rules, that is absolute nonsense. It seems that he wants to create a panel of sorts to decide what kind of speech should be policed, if any. Perhaps he will put in place people who are “concerned” that too much emphasis is placed on extremists from the right, even after January 6.
Last week Musk posted that “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Yet just days afterward following the violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of current House Speaker Nancy, Musk responded to a tweet by Hillary Clinton attacking Republicans for inciting such actions with a link to a claim by a far-right “news” site that suggested that there was a “possibility” that the attacker was in fact a “gay lover” of Paul Pelosi, and this was some “lovers’ spat.”
Following the Los Angeles Times report the assailant was actually a homophobic, racist QAnon fanatic, Musk deleted the tweet and the link, but not before many of his 112 million followers were poisoned with this false claim. One would think that since the buck now stops with him, Musk would feel a certain accountability in taking the lead in responsible behavior. But being an avid Twitter user who likes shooting off his mouth, perhaps this is too much to expect from him, especially if he takes a “hands on” approach to running the platform to suit him personally, and makes money for him.
But there is a problem, not just for him but for other social media platforms: Section 230 is under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Part of the communications “decency” act of 1996, Section 230 was the exception to the rule:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
It was argued that it was too difficult for content platforms to monitor everything that content providers did on their platforms, and to do so would not only have a “chilling” impact on free speech and the willingness to use a platform, but also effect revenue streams. Back in April when Musk’s takeover attempt was starting, Matt Stoller wrote that he isn’t responsible for—just part of—the problem with social media, whose current “models are addictive, they depress us, they make us hate each other, and they tear societies apart by fostering ethnic conflict.”
To be clear, Stoller is no "liberal"; his concern isn't far from that of Ron DeSantis, whose "interest" is to keep people uneducated about who and what they should hate. Stoller notes, however, that there is a financial incentive to incite hate, which of course is why we find on corporate-run talk radio nothing but right-wing hate-talk. Internet platforms are allowed to do this by contravening the rules from the pre-Internet world:
Twitter is a communications network that sells ads, and so it has an incentive to manipulate what we say to each other to keep us using and selling ads. But even though Twitter structures speech, it is not liable for the speech it structures. Same with Facebook, Google, Grindr, TiKTok, etc. This model is not how telephone networks work. You pay your telecom provider directly for the service, and they do not care who you call or what you say, and they do not try to manipulate their customers. They are not conflicted because they do not sell ads, they sell a common carrier service. As a result, they are not liable for what their customers talk about.
While a newspaper or broadcast outlets can be sued for defamatory stories or those that incite violence--and a conspiracy fanatic like Alex Jones on his personal platform can be held liable for dangerous misinformation to the tune of $1 billion--digital platforms like Twitter and YouTube thus far face immunity from liability. If Musk feels that lip service to "policing" is sufficient while in reality doing very little, Twitter can “amplify” or "sell" similar content that leads to violence—just as YouTube is being accused of in the Supreme Court case.
The problem for Musk is if he isn’t serious about policing Twitter and the Supreme Court repeals Section 230, it may affect him more than he realizes. If people know he has “deep pockets,” and Twitter can be found liable for content that can be proved to have led to violence, them he personally can be held liable for damages, or at the very least through his ownership stake in the company.
Instead of having a legitimate policing system in place to remove dangerous misinformation and conspiracies--and allowing "permanently banned" offenders to return to continue to run amok--Musk may find that not only is himself being “policed," but those who oversee other content platforms as well. The only way to avoid that is if he takes his public and social responsibilities more seriously than he wished when he bought Twitter in the first place.
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