Jennifer Stromer-Galley is a professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford University Press).
Elon Musk has long championed free speech on the social media platform Twitter, and decried the company’s efforts to regulate speech. Musk explained in a TED interview shortly after he announced his plan to buy Twitter that the platform “has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law” is a naïve understanding of the challenges of promoting healthy public discourse on a social media platform.
When Twitter was launched back in 2006, I was skeptical of a social networking site that only allowed 180 characters. As a scholar of public deliberation, it was hard to see how anyone could make a clear or thoughtful argument in what amounted to a sentence. Instead, I and other researchers imagined Twitter would mostly be a site for expressing emotion and shouting vitriol. Even today, with the doubling of the character length for a tweet, and the ability to “thread” tweets into a longer post, it’s still a platform where much of the discussion is people emoting outrage, spreading misinformation and attacking perspectives that they disagree with.
In Musk’s view of the town square, “free speech” reigns supreme, and no one can be removed from the town square unless they violate the law. I think it’s fair to presume that in Musk’s vision people like former President Donald Trump would be welcomed back. I’ve studied Trump’s tweets and other social media accounts since his run for president, and Trump’s tweets were the epitome of problematic speech. Trump’s tweets demeaned, dehumanized and belittled anyone who crossed him in any way. Worse, during his re-election campaign, he used Twitter (as well as Facebook and Facebook ads) as the president of the United States to repeatedly attack the integrity of the 2020 presidential election outcome months before people even started voting. After the election, Trump further used Twitter to reinforce false narratives about fraudulent balloting, urging his supporters to take action and “stop the steal” and they listened. On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Musk’s vision of unfettered speech in the public town square presumes the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor — the notion that the best ideas and arguments prevail. But, as we have seen repeatedly on Twitter and the other social media platforms, there is a less a “marketplace of ideas” and more a festering cesspool of outrage and lies, where vulnerable and minoritized people often end up the focus of attack.
Moreover, the ideal of free speech that is embedded in our Constitution governs regulation of speech by the government. Musk will own a publicly traded company, and even if he takes it private as he suggests, it is still ultimately a private business and not a governmental organization. As a private business, the expectations around regulating speech are substantially more murky, while the potential consequences as we saw on Jan. 6 remain incredibly consequential. Musk’s business acumen leaves him ill-equipped to tackle the realities of owning the town square.
Related: Elon Musk’s push for ‘free speech’ on Twitter: Repeating history?
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