Whether it’s a commentary on the importance of Twitter as the “digital town square” or people just really hate Elon Musk, his purchase of Jack’s baby has hit a lot of people hard. It’s not as if they know what will happen, or that if they really hate Musk’s version of twitter, they can’t log off. But they don’t want to. What they want is for Twitter to be run the way they want it to be run, and that means no speech that hurts their feelings.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Mr. Musk said in his announcement of the deal. He professes to have a healthy tolerance of criticism. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” he tweeted.
But the statements of free speech absolutists like Mr. Musk conflates harassment with criticism. I’ve been on the receiving end of both in my two decades of writing columns about media, finance, culture and politics — and there is a material difference between the two.
The author, Elizabeth Spiers, was the editor-in-chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker, so it’s no surprise that her writing evoked some harsh responses. Her position is that criticism is part of the job, but harassment isn’t.
However, I’ve also received rape threats, anonymous letters to my home address, threatening comments about my family and all manner of misogynistic pejoratives that are not printable in this newspaper for my stated positions on everything from abortion to hiring practices at start-ups to who the next James Bond should be. I don’t even have to write anything particularly provocative for this to happen; I once got a violent threat for a column I wrote about why I disagree with the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the Consumer Price Index.
People can be awful, but these don’t appear to be related to Twitter, but rather Spiers’ occupation. So where does Twitter fit into this?
These are not uncommon experiences for women and minorities who speak in public, on Twitter and beyond, and I’ve suffered far less harassment than others. It happens all the time. Twitter’s current moderation policies can’t completely prevent it, but they are designed to mitigate it. Twitter requires its users to comply with a terms of service agreement that bans certain types of speech — harassment, in particular. It also has moderation policies in place to combat disinformation. The value of these measures isn’t always apparent to powerful people such as Mr. Musk because if you’re a white man on the internet, you’re far less likely to get a rape threat, and you’re also heavily insulated from the possibility of real-world violence.
While concepts like harassment remain extremely vague, usually defined by the sensibilities of the person claiming to be harassed, If Spiers’ concern is threats of violence or rape, she has a point. But “policies in place to combat disinformation” is an entirely different problem, inserted in there as if to go unnoticed. Who decides what’s “disinformation”? Spiers? Twitter algos? Musk?
Of course, getting rid of policies that restrict hate speech will most likely affect women and minorities much more than it does white men like Mr. Musk, and unlike him, most people on the receiving end of threats and harassment can’t afford personal security. Twitter’s rules already allow for a broad range of abuse, much of which falls into a kind of gray area between personal insult and harassment.
Of course it will impact women and minorities more than “white men like Mr. Musk” becaus he’s a billionaire who can afford to buy Twitter, unlike white men like me who can’t.
What exactly does he believe can’t be said on the platform right now? It certainly doesn’t take long to find discredited race science, arguments that women are intellectually inferior, antisemitism, defenses of white supremacism and transphobic comments that remain on the platform even under current policy. It is easy to assume that the banned speech that Mr. Musk is standing up for is worse even than that. As the comedian Michael Che put it on “Saturday Night Live,” the $44 billion deal shows “how badly white guys want to use the N-word.”
Spiers went from arguing for moderation to prevent threats of rape to the trope of the only people who stand for the principle of free speech are “white guys [who] want to use the N-word.” Apparently, the problem isn’t really Twitter or Musk, but free speech that might not conform to the speech Spiers would prefer only be permitted. It’s not as if a million people screaming “racist” wouldn’t happen on Twitter, with the consequences that such a mob can muster.
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