• by Colin Kirkland , Staff Writer, June 14, 2023

For the sake of users and advertisers, a social media platform that values “free speech” as much as Elon Musk’s Twitter claims to is nothing without dedicated across-the-board (meaning free to all users) content moderation.

If you’re angered in any way by the quotations around “free speech,” part of my decision to do so is a tad snarky (since I don’t personally agree with or quite understand Musk’s Twitter vision), but it also shows how fluid the definition of “free speech” is.

How likely is it that two people––even two people using the same political identifier, whether it’s liberal,  libertarian, green, centrist, socialist, etc.––would define “free speech” in the same way? What about “safety”?

I know my answer: Not very likely.

Now think about your family members and friends. Think about an entire user base––there are almost 354 million users on Twitter. Think about Elon Musk’s definition of "free speech compared to Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino’s definition. To see their diverging approaches in trying to excite users about Twitter 2.0, compare Musk’s troll-like tweet––“Looking to hire a VP of Witchcraft and Propaganda”––to Yaccarino’s impassioned manifesto-y thread a day later.

But while diversity among the leaders of a social network, or any successful company, is essential, diversity among millions of people on a major social network is inevitable and will be devastating without safety parameters and proper content moderation practices.

Which means leaving content moderation up to the users themselves––also known as Musk’s expansion of “Community Notes” after firing the majority of Twitter’s content moderation team––now depends on millions of definitions of free speech and safety.

Maybe Americans with opposing moral and political views would have been better equipped to find common ground in the past, but we now live in a brutally divided landscape in which all bets are off.

Another reason dedicated, across-the-board content moderation is essential for platforms like Twitter comes down to advertising. Despite folks claiming that Musk already thinks Twitter relies too much on advertising, and that he’s never used it to sell Teslas, these are the facts: Twitter is hemorrhaging money, and Tesla has changed its tune about running ads, according to Musk's remarks at a shareholders meeting in May.

For Twitter to thrive, or simply just stay afloat, advertising dollars are necessary. Since eradicating its content moderation team, Twitter’s value has plummeted, now worth around $15 billion––a third of what Musk and co-investors originally paid for it last October.

To understand how badly Twitter needs ad dollars, just look at Musk’s erratic, needy policy changes over the past year, like forcing advertisers to pay $1,000 per month for “Verification for Organizations” just to do the same thing they’ve always done, when he could have offered them new incentives or fixed the reported bugs in Twitter’s ad platform.

Fans of Musk may think liberals (or “Satan-worshiping-pedophiles," or whoever's the most recent villain according to the far right) control the media  but what does “controlling” the media actually mean?

Is it not buying a wildly influential global social messaging service used by millions of people to share ideas and thoughts––much of which skew political––for billions of dollars more that it’s worth, depleting the very team responsible for limiting the spread of disinformation and harmful content, then inviting back the most radical, hateful accounts, some of which align with the owner’s stated political beliefs?

“Twitter is on a mission to become the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication,” tweeted Yaccarino at the start of her second week on the job. “That’s not an empty promise. That’s OUR reality.”

Often, it seems, truth embeds itself at the farthest reaches of hypocrisy. Twitter’s current reality isn't any different.