Twitter will now become the barometer of free speech

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Twitter was never about profit, it was about the public good. Yet we’ve seen two different trajectories of this basic principle. On the one hand Twitter’s erstwhile management turned that public good into a tool of social control and information management. On the other, the new management has a history of taking a public good and genuinely democratising it, and making it profitable.

Elon Musk’s task hasn’t been easy. Remember the time when the second man on the moon, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin rubbished Musk’s plans to go to space? Yet he proved Aldrin wrong. However, Twitter has had a set of teething problems that need to be fixed first before it takes off. The problem is that many of those problems are vastly exaggerated.

The first problem is the most basic one: of Twitter staff being deeply-infected by the ‘woke disease’. While the most-visible aspect of this is the blatant double standards in application, the deeper problem is how woke ideology would have affected millions of lines of algorithms over the years.

The simplest example of application double standards was to do with elections: where any mention of election theft of the 2020 United States presidential election was banned; a gossip campaign undermining India’s 2019 elections as being rigged by electronic voting machines was not. However, the algorithmic double standards are deeper, and have to be perceived as they cannot be seen. Videos of sporadic lynchings in India are allowed to remain on Twitter due to its journalistic value. But videos of the Sri Lankan engineer who was lynched for blasphemy in Pakistan were deleted immediately. Similarly we’ve seen that some communities can be verbally attacked without mercy on Twitter, while attacks on certain others are deemed legitimate.

It's now getting increasing clear that what Musk wants is to remove any political bias or arbitration power that Twitter operationalises those political biases through. He wants it to conform to the law and no more. The criticism is that laws vary from country to country. This actually makes Twitter’s intermediary role very easy. It sets the baseline at where US law stands — that is to say the Brandenburg principle: specific threat against a specific target. After that each country decides what needs to be geo-blocked in that country on the basis of local law. This is actually a really simple and elegant solution. The reason Twitter got into so much trouble in the past was that instead of accepting legal relativism, it embraced the woke view of universal applicability of an evolving morality, which needs uniform application globally.

This becomes problematic for two sets of people: one are those that ‘get triggered’ and want all public speech regulated in a way that it doesn’t ‘hurt their feelings’. Needless to say that public speech is too important an issue to be subject to the fragile sensitivities of a tiny unrepresentative minority.

The second concern though is much more important — fake news and misinformation. The problem is what exactly is fake news and misinformation? The problem why no democracy has been able to tackle this is because there is no agreed justiciable standard, and as Politifact in the US and AltNews in India show us, ‘fact checkers’ are usually partisan players. At any rate this is a function of government and not of an intermediary, which is why the very first act to make Twitter profitable will be setting basic algorithms and cutting down the excess staff deployed to police infractions, passing that function onto local authorities.

Finally, we need to understand that Twitter is going to get a lot more abrasive. For some of us who complained, it was the double standards that were the problem, not the abrasiveness. But for others in India, they need to realise that their ‘feelings’ are going to get bruised quite badly. That’s actually a good thing because it does something this country desperately needs — genuine blasphemy that pushes the boundaries of free speech, instead of the staged political, professional outraging.

All up Twitter will now become the barometer of free speech. The problems will not be attributed to the platform, but rather to local authorities. That, as far as any democracy goes, is the very best thing that could happen.

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.