Is Musk The Solution, The Problem, Both or Neither?

When news broke that Twitter’s board of directors approved its sale to Elon Musk, a weird thing happened. People expressed their passionate beliefs that this mattered to them. From the usual suspects spewing their usual inanities to a priest with an ill-advised wealth commentary to the ACLU and Amnesty International fearful of the dangers of free speech.

Musk says that he’s going to promote free speech on Twitter.

Yesss!!! pic.twitter.com/0T9HzUHuh6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022

Not too long ago, this might have been considered a good thing, perhaps even the sort of thing that the ACLU would support. Times have changed.

Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of dubious claims, whether putting out misleading financial information or calling the British diver who helped rescue trapped schoolboys in Thailand a “pedo guy.”

Twitter has a racism problem. Time and again, it has failed to consequentially answer the pleas of users of color to address the bigotry and harassment that are endemic for them. Tesla, the carmaker that Mr. Musk runs, has its own racism problem, with many workers complaining to the press and California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing suing the company over an allegedly pervasive problem of racialized degradation. The agency recently described one of Tesla’s plants as “a racially segregated workplace” rife with slurs as well as discrimination “in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion.”

Twitter has a bullying and harassment problem, and the subtler but related challenge of bringing out the worst, not the best, in all of us. Mr. Musk is the incarnation of these problems, too. Though you might think that having more than $250 billion, according to Forbes, and wanting to solve the problems of Earth and space would fully occupy someone, he seems to have a compulsive need to belittle people and burp out his least-considered impulses and stoke bullying by his legions of admirers in a way that both reflects and shapes how Twitter is.

Putting aside whether Anand Giridharadas’ characterizations, whether of Twitter or Musk, are accurate, his points aren’t really about either Twitter or Musk, but about the good free speech and the bad free speech. Musk, he argues, represents the bad free speech.

Mr. Musk operates from a flawed, if widespread, misapprehension of the free speech issue facing the country. In his vision, what we may, with help from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, call negative freedom of speech, the freedom to speak without restraint by powerful authorities, is the only freedom of speech. And so freeing Nazis to Nazi, misogynists to bully and harass and doxx and brigade women, even former president Donald Trump to possibly get his Twitter account back — this cutting of restraints becomes the whole of the project.

In contrast, Giridharadas offers the good free speech.

But there is also what we may call positive freedom of speech: affirmative steps to create conditions that allow all people to feel and be free to say what they think.

How, you ask, can “all people” feel free to say what they think if people who say negative things must be silenced? The answer, of course, is that “all people” isn’t really all people, but all people who say things Giridharadas and people like him believe to be appropriate.

Legally speaking, all American women or people of color or both who were ever talked over in a meeting or denied a book contract or not hired to give their opinion on television enjoy the protections of the First Amendment. The constitutional protection of speech does not, on its own, engender a society in which the chance to be heard is truly abundant and free and equitably distributed.

Legally speaking, the First Amendment doesn’t protect anyone from being talked over, denied a book contract or not hired to give their opinion on television, even if Joy Reid is to blame. You would think someone at the New York Times would have noticed this rather glaring error and urged Giridharadas to correct it. But even though it’s nonsensical, legally speaking, he may have known that and chosen to say it anyway, because such conflations are permissible when they serve the cause.

The “censorship” that Mr. Musk performatively deplores consists of efforts to rectify these very real problems of harassment and abuse. Twitter has taken modest but wildly inadequate steps to improve safety on the platform. It has acknowledged it has a problem. It has recognized positive freedom of speech — the creation of a safe and non-life-ruining environment for the airing of thoughts. And it is this that Mr. Musk and his ilk seem to loathe.

It’s unclear who Musk’s “ilk” are. Billionaires? Plutocrats? Supporters of free speech? But what is clear is that Giridharadas and his ilk believe their speech is the good speech and contrary speech is bad. They want “the creation of a safe and non-life-ruining environment for the airing of thoughts” as long as the thoughts are only their thoughts. As for other thoughts, they deserve what happens to them. It’s not “cancel culture,” but consequences for being bad and evil.

Does this mean that Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a win for free speech, despite the spin of the censors? Probably not. As Mike Masnick has explained many times over, moderation at scale is impossible, there being just too many twits and algos being too imprecise a tool. The value of Twitter is the people, that it’s where people have chosen to be. But what Musk’s purchase is more likely to do is stem the progressive tide of silencing speech that doesn’t conform to its orthodoxy.

This is why his deal to purchase Twitter is so dangerous. In recent years, there has been progress toward positive freedom of speech — real work to give everyone, truly everyone, more meaningful occasion to speak. Mr. Musk apparently wants to shut that down. Instead, in a moment of proto-fascism on the political right, his priority seems to be to undam the flood of bile and bigotry and bullying and disinformation.

If Elon Musk can stop the “progress toward positive freedom of speech” on Twitter, it will be a significant accomplishment. Beyond that, there is little likelihood that Musk’s purchase of Twitter is going to change your life. Maybe he’ll finally add an “edit” button, but that’s about it. And if someone on Twitter says something that offends you, you can always block them or, as I do, shrug.