Elon Musk Is Rolling the Dice on Democracy

Last night, Elon Musk completed his turbulent, on-again-off-again effort to purchase Twitter; he’s now the owner of the microblogging platform. Huzzah for him, I guess. His takeover signals a new chapter for the company, and his first actions throw what little certainty I had about misinformation on the platform completely out the window. This is not where we want to be just a few weeks before the US midterm elections.

Free Marketplace of Ideas or Free-for-All Hellscape?

I’ve been thinking about misinformation and social media for a while now. Most recently, PCMag published my story about what Twitter should do about misinformation on its platform. Musk was a wild card in my discussions. He’s been vocally skeptical about limiting any speech on the platform, but he’s also notoriously mercurial and it was a mystery if he would follow through. 

We may have received a clue as to which way he was going in his first act as owner. After the deal was closed, he reportedly fired several executives including Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust, and safety.

The dismissal of Gadde stuck out to me because of the role she’s played in managing misinformation on Twitter. In reporting from May of this year, The Washington Post described Gadde and her team this way(Opens in a new window): 

“Defenders say her team, known as the trust and safety organization, has worked painstakingly to rein in coronavirus misinformation, bullying and other harmful speech on the site, moves that necessarily limit some forms of expression. […] She pioneered strategies for flagging harmful content without removing it, adopting warning labels and “interstitials,” which cover up Tweets that break Twitter’s rules and give people control over what content they see—strategies copied by Twitter’s much larger rival, Facebook.”

Now, Twitter’s track record for controlling misinformation on its platform is not great, and many of the people I interviewed were critical of Twitter’s use of these tools to control misinformation. They told me that labeling Tweets may have helped spread misinformation and not provided adequate context to readers. 

But the interview subjects did prefer efforts to control misinformation that didn’t remove content, that did slow the spread of false information, and did provide more factual information for Twitter users. That seems to align with some of the tools The Washington Post attributes to Gadde’s team. If Musk’s decision to sack Gadde is a reflection of his view on managing misinformation in general, that’s worrying. 

An Unknown Quantity

Twitter’s strategy for misinformation was already muddled, but Musk’s is a mystery. Beyond a few scattershot statements, Musk still hasn’t articulated a clear vision of how he wants to combat misinformation on Twitter. 

What we do know is that Musk thinks Twitter is too restrictive. In some ways, that aligns with what experts told me Twitter needs to do. They said that an effort that focuses on slowing the spread of false information, debunking known misinformation tropes before they appear, and providing context to readers would do the most good. Most also felt that wholesale removal of content wouldn’t be effective. 

Jevin West, an associate professor at the University of Washington, told me that moderate use of several different misinformation interventions appears to be more effective than any one intervention taken to an extreme. This included deplatforming, a practice Musk appears to dislike.

“I can say that the results so far show that deplatforming may not be as effective at reducing the spread of misinformation as we originally thought,” said West, but cautioned that further study may challenge that finding. Such is the way of science.

The closest I’ve seen to Musk laying out his view on misinformation was an iOS Notes app post where he promised, to advertisers at least, that “Twitter won’t become a free-for-all hellscape.” But that was about reassuring advertisers, not about controlling misinformation, or ensuring people had good information before and during an election.

Making the platform tolerable for advertisers isn’t the same as preventing the weaponization of misinformation.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

Even as I was writing this piece, Musk’s position has evolved. He now says that content moderation will be handled by a “council with widely diverse viewpoints.” That doesn’t clarify much, and one wonders if Musk will continue to announce important company policies via Tweet.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

The Dice Are Rolling

Although Twitter has proven to be an important part of modern online discussion, it’s not actually the linchpin of democracy, and Gadde is not the sole person responsible for managing misinformation on Twitter. But without buy-in from Musk, I worry that Twitter, which is already known for spreading misinformation, will become a weapon of mass destruction in information warfare.

It’s clear that there’s no time for Elon—or anyone—to dramatically improve Twitter’s control over misinformation before the next US election. There is, however, more than enough time for things to get much, much worse.