Twitter is an amazing platform. During the pandemic you could have direct access to the thoughts and opinions of the top scientists in the world. They would even answer your questions! If you are interested in politics you can follow the best journalists and get the very latest news – often before it breaks anywhere else. Twitter played an important part in the hope of the Arab Spring. Indeed, when any significant event happens you can follow it directly on twitter and get information you just wouldn’t be able to access anywhere else.
It also has a dark side. You can be inadvertently exposed to extreme points of view or content. Twitter has an algorithm that wants to keep you using twitter. The way these algorithms work – if you show an interest in bad content you will automatically be fed more. This can lead to people developing quite extreme viewpoints. You might be a little unhappy about something and you look for other people that are and you end up going down a rabbit hole where you start believing things that are demonstrably untrue. You follow people with similar views and it creates a bubble where everyone validates and reinforces their extreme beliefs. This is why you need some form of content moderation to prevent people being radicalized in the first place.
Following his recent purchase of twitter, Elon Musk has created a furore by sacking half the workforce, announcing that they will charge for verified status and talking about absolute free speech. These are all terrible ideas. Advertisers are already starting to drop the platform.
If twitter charges for verification, someone can for instance say “I’m Martin Lewis” and pay over their money. They can then use their new status as the UK’s most trusted money saving expert to flog dodgy get rich quick schemes on the internet. Martin Lewis is already constantly fighting to stop scammers using his name. For twitter to make this worse would be a bad thing.
But the really big one is free speech. I believed in free speech as a heady teenager back in my early days on the internet. But experience has taught me over and over again that absolute free speech does not work. You need to have rules and you need to enforce the rules. If twitter abandons these rules it will become a wasteland of hatred and extremism. Ordinary people will be driven away.
But the whole thing raises a wider issue. Who should own social media? After all Twitter is made by the people that use it. Should an individual be allowed to own it and use it as their personal plaything? Should even a corporation be allowed that much control over people, their data and their communications. Should a government? Many twitter users are migrating to Mastodon, which is a network of servers, run by enthusiasts and volunteers, putting the power back in the hands of the people. Each server has their own rules, but if you don’t like those rules you can join another server or start your own. The main rule though is “Be Nice” Maybe this could be the future. If you’d like to join me on there you can find me at @ztulloch@mstdn.social