NYT:
If Twitter wants to pull back from moderating speech on its site, will people be less willing to hang out where they might be harassed by those who disagree with them and swamped by pitches for cryptocurrency, fake Gucci handbags or pornography?
The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote that same year gave Silicon Valley executives, U.S. elected officials and the public a peek into what can go wrong when social media companies opt not to wade too deeply into what people say on their sites. Russian propagandists amplified the views of deeply divided Americans and Britons, further polarizing the electorate.
During Mr. Trump’s presidency — particularly in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic and then as Mr. Trump and his supporters spread false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election — Twitter, Facebook and YouTube changed their tune about the role they played in fanning anger, lies, distortions and division that left some people feeling exhausted and cynical about the world around them.
Twitter and Facebook, pressured at times by their employees, took more steps to pull down or label posts that might break their rules against false information and tinkered with computer systems to suppress viral lies from spreading far and fast. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube also kicked Mr. Trump off their platforms after the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.
It was a crossing-the-Rubicon moment when the “tweets must flow” crowd acknowledged that it could and should do more to prevent people from using its internet properties to blare information that could mislead or harm others.
Some of the judgment calls from Twitter and its peers might have been speech-control overreach. Now more governments around the world are forcing social media companies to shift from largely self-regulating online expression to following government-enforced rules.
New laws, including the Digital Services Act in the European Union, require Twitter and its peers to do more to scrub their sites of misinformation and abuse. In other countries, such as Vietnam, social media companies risk legal jeopardy when people post what the government deems unflattering criticisms of it. Twitter and other social media companies are in the position of potentially harming free expression and democracy when they intervene too little in what people post online and when they intervene too much.
Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at St. John’s University School of Law, said growing laws over online expression theoretically took some power over speech away from unelected Silicon Valley executives. But those leaders still must decide on the interpretation of the laws and make decisions on the speech ungoverned by them.
There is no getting around the fact that Mr. Musk will join Mr. Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, TikTok’s Shouzi Chew and Apple’s Tim Cook as the handful of corporate executives who have enormous say over granting or denying access to influential platforms of global discourse.