By Sara Ghanawi | Staff Writer
On October 28, 2022, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and most recently Twitter, tweeted that “The bird is freed” after his $44 billion purchase of the platform. Few weeks into his reign, it’s becoming clearer that Elon Musk only freed the bird into chaos, controversy, and the wide gloomy sky of hate speech.
As an onset, Musk asserted that his purchase of twitter was an attempt to “help humanity” by ensuring absolute free speech under no restraints. However, what has played out in the past few weeks demonstrates that this noble goal of his isn’t taking him, nor his platform, far enough.
First off, as a platform with global reach, Elon Musk would have to confide to the laws of the countries in which Twitter will be operating. The European Union, for example, announced its adoption of a Digital Services Act as soon as Musk announced his ownership. This means that Twitter guidelines would be forced to restrict content that promotes terrorism, sexual abuse, and hate speech as defined by the EU. Musk asserted that he agrees with the necessity of content moderation, a process he’s been carping about for a while.
Even in the US, the law regulates free speech on its own terms, which Musk will have to consider despite his promises
What makes his promises even more questionable is that Saudi Arabia, a country where women got their right to drive just 5 years ago, and just recently got their right to travel alone without a male guardian’s permission, is the second largest shareholder in Twitter; which may endanger any activist, journalist, or human rights group that uses the platform to speak about humanitarian violations of the Saudi government.
After all the backlash, Musk retreated from his initial absolutist stance to tweet: “Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Yet, other tweets of his still appear to be contradictory. He tweeted that by “free speech”, he means what matches the law, a wobbly definition of free speech at best. But if that is the case and the definition he’s now going by, then how would he explain his request of scrapping all permanent bans on users, even vulgar ones like Donald Trump. Although Musk asserted that free speech should be under the umbrella of law, he doesn’t seem to consider that a user like Donald Trump was banned from twitter due to inciting riots and violence in January, 2021 – which is, by law, impermissible; not to mention Trump’s blatantly racist tweets..
Racist tweets surfaced and took over twitter the moment Elon Musk gained ownership, with trolls spamming racist and anti-Semitic slurs. Additionally, Twitter employees’ willingness to stay at work also dwindled. Thousands of workers were laid off and thousands of others are considering quitting.
It is undoubtable that Elon Musk is a brilliant billionaire of our century. He is clearly a visionary and his aims at achieving an utterly free speech platform might be well-founded . After all, Musk is losing advertisers and revenues with every decision he makes for the sake of this cause. The controversial opinions, extremism, and radicalism that free speech entails come off as very repugnant for advertisers, causing them to flee away.
The main quandary remains in the vague definition of what free speech is and the undrawn line between what is free and what is hateful. Only when a uniform and clear definition is established will we be able to regulate discourse. It seems that to Musk, free speech is equivalent to free thought. You’re free to express whatever comes up to your mind, no matter how controversial, without having to face consequences. Perhaps, this may be the only way for humanity to actually confront the root problems of the issues we face. People would have to grapple with the complex reality in order to free society from what’s holding it back. Yet, acknowledging that systematic oppression and racism actually exist, we have to come to terms with the fact that some voices will be heard more than others, some voices will be more relevant, and some will systematically be taken into legal account more often. Accordingly, certain groups’ freedom of speech will incessantly overshadow and silence that of underprivileged groups. We’re then left with two options: either respectfulness that curtails freedom of speech for the sake of inclusion, or offensiveness that would eventually lead us to confront the truth. Either way, a problem will be eliminated to magnify another.