Musk described Twitter as the world’s town square, a place where anyone could make himself heard by anyone else who also had a stake in the matter under discussion. He offered to buy it up in order to insulate it from a perceived culture of censorship. He was opposed, for example, to the life ban on President Trump following the January 6, 2021 attack by Trump supporters on the US House of Representatives as it met to ratify the election results that removed Trump from the White House. The trove of Musk’s text messages released as part of the court case that Twitter initiated after Musk decided he would not, after all, buy Twitter as proposed, revealed a number of right-wing personalities in American public life offering him support for his proposed acquisition.
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There is speculation that Musk’s latest change of heart on Twitter might have been motivated by Musk’s desire to avert a court hearing in the case, in which more of his text messages would be made public.
There is general consensus that Twitter, after Musk buys it and takes it private, would be more tolerant of unfettered free speech, regardless of the veracity, hatefulness or lack of civility in the messages carried by the platform.
How would this work out in India? India figures right among the top three countries when it comes to government requests to social media platforms to take down messages. This is for Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In July this year, Twitter sued the Government over its order to take down some content. If the incumbent management of Twitter, which, in Trump’s view, is all too ready to give in to censorship demands, finds the Government of India’s take-down requests too many and too expedient, a Twitter under Musk would be even more resistant to government pressure. That could, if Musk-led Twitter sticks to its core free-speech commitment, lead to a full-fledged confrontation between the government and Twitter.
The government would not like to join the ranks of China, Iran, Myanmar and Russia, among others, who all have banned Twitter. It would not gel with India’s claim to be counted among the democracies of the world. However, if a resolute Twitter refuses to comply with government requests to take down messages officially deemed inappropriate, it could lead to stiff penalties on the social media platform and its employees working in India, prompting the platform’s exit from India.
The only eventuality in which this does not happen is Twitter deciding it will comply with the government’s demands, even if under protest. The government has not changed its domestic policies in deference to criticism from abroad.
A Musk-run Twitter could have some healthy new features. Since Musk claims a large proportion of Twitter accounts are run by automated pieces of software, bots in the jargon, and raised this as one reason for trying to back out from his original offer to buy the company for $44 billion, he is bound to, as owner, put in place stronger measures than Twitter has at present to block and weed out bots. This would reduce the utility of Twitter for deliberate spreaders of misinformation on the platform. That would be a plus for democracy.
If Musk wished to carry this cleansing process to its next logical step, he could institute a fact-checking account of its own, in addition to independent fact-checkers who already operate on the platform.
Social media platforms lend themselves to endless repetition of lies. Nailing a lie and amplifying that message is important for protecting the integrity of not just social media platforms but of the information people consume and shape their actions. Removal of bots that are used by professional spreaders of misinformation would help in this regard. At the same time, if human propagators of misinformation, mischief and hate proliferate and act in concert, it would be difficult to thwart them with technological means alone.
Twitter would need to accept that sociological norms that render an extreme opinion par for the course in its home country, the US, might be very different in India, and acceptable social media norms for India would have to be forged in India and enforced with the backing of the local law, rather than in defiance of it.
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