https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/technology/twitter-elon-musk-free-speech.html
The author asks, "When is more speech better, and when is it worse? And who gets to decide?" as if that's a hard question. More speech is always better and the market decided the moment language formed.
I think what the author is missing most is where to place the burden. She mentions that employers have started threatening to fire employees over tweets. Is that on Twitter? One of my previous bosses talked about firing a young woman because, when she was getting on a plane, she was standing behind a woman wearing a hijab and took a picture of her (in which the woman couldn't be identified), and tweeted it with a joke about her plane about to be hijacked. The woman was well known to be an employee of an organization that was already controversial. No matter where you stand on whether or not her firing was appropriate, how can you say that's Twitter's fault? Is the role of social media companies to play mother and warn you that you might not want to say what you're gonna say every step of the way?
The authors concerns about foreign governments are equally bizarre. If anything, if Musk gives us the Twitter that he's promising, which he rapidly took steps to do yesterday, Twitter will be a tool to smash propaganda and orthodoxy rather than exacerbate it.
Propaganda has historically been a powerful thing and it still is; but, through most of history, governments have been able to ensure that the propaganda is all the people get to safely see. The complication here isn't what the author thinks. The complication is whether or not Twitter will play ball with authoritarian regimes to keep profits up. Only time will tell.
Also, the author raised a question about how Musk may deal with people advertising pornography.
Ummm, there's already been pornographic material on Twitter for a long time.
