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A float depicting Elon Musk is seen in Cologne, Germany on Feb 14, 2023.
When he took over Twitter, Elon Musk repeatedly claimed that his primary objective was to protect free speech. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” he posted back in April of last year when the purchase was first announced. “I’m just fighting for free speech in America,” he claimed in November.
It has since become clear that Musk was lying through his teeth, as someone familiar with his past pronouncements about self-driving car technology or landing someone on Mars might have anticipated. Twitter has continued to ban leftists, reporters and critics from the platform—occasionally on Musk’s own direct orders—and he also obeys censorship demands from authoritarian regimes. Most recently, Platformer reports that he demanded a change that boosted his own posts in the platform’s algorithm 1,000-fold, because he got mad when President Biden’s Superbowl tweet got more impressions than his did. Some speech is more free than others, it seems.
But in the process, Musk has demonstrated an important truth about speech—namely, that it requires a context of thoughtful rules to serve the public good. Toxic cesspits full of insanity, lies, and propaganda, as Twitter has become, are an obstacle to public reason and democratic self-government.
As a longtime Twitter addict trying to get clean with mixed success, I can testify that Musk’s changes have badly degraded the usefulness of the website. It already wasn’t all that reliable when it came to nuanced or technical subjects, but it was at least pretty good at surfacing breaking news from around the world. Whenever there was some kind of major event, you could easily find lots of legit reporting and expert perspectives.
Some of that still happens, but it’s much harder to find now amid the clamor of hysteria, shouting, and misinformation. During the recent train derailment in East Palestine, for instance, it was very difficult to get a handle on just how bad an accident it was thanks to random accounts that bought Musk’s newly for-sale “verification” checks going mega-viral screeching that it was going to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, that it was comparable to or worse than Chernobyl (Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Meghan McCain got in on that one), that it would permanently poison huge chunks of the country, and so on.
Another claim going viral is that the burning of the vinyl chloride spilled in East Palestine is going to create massive volumes of dioxins—perhaps enough to poison the entire Ohio River basin. But this is simply not true. Dioxins are a dangerous family of fairly complex molecules with a three-ring structure. Vinyl chloride is a double-bonded two-carbon molecule with one chlorine atom attached. One learns in organic chemistry class that large multicyclic structures like the dioxin skeleton can be created from a vinyl chloride-style starting material, but it would require strict laboratory conditions to actually be produced in anything but tiny magnitudes.
Obviously, that is not to say that the derailment is not extremely concerning, or that vinyl chloride is not toxic itself, or that it doesn’t produce other toxic chemicals when burned. Those things are all true—it is carcinogenic, and it produces mainly hydrogen chloride and phosgene gas when burned. Some dioxins may have been produced in the fire, since many kinds of plastic can emit them when burned, particularly at low temperatures. But hysterically exaggerating the scope and threat of what happened doesn’t do anyone any favors.
One thing that would dramatically improve the quality of discourse in this country—and actually expand the freedom of speech enjoyed by the public—would be confiscatory taxation of the rich.
It has similarly become very difficult to follow the latest COVID-19 science on Twitter, thanks to sundry grifters and lunatics flooding the zone with nonsense. You’ve got hysterics (often with exaggerated or made-up credentials) touting every dubious paper or misrepresenting good ones, claiming the virus is going to permanently disable or kill everyone on earth. Then you’ve got even more prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists screaming that COVID is in fact completely harmless, and that any time anyone dies anywhere it was because they got the vaccine.
Legit scientists have had to take their dialogue elsewhere. When I spoke to Anthony Bertoletti, professor of emerging infectious diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School, he told me he joined Twitter at the start of the pandemic and found it very handy, but has since all but given up. “At the beginning it was extremely useful, because there were people that were working on COVID, so you were able to follow the literature, and you were able to have good discussions about the data,” he said. “Now it’s impossible.”
As I’ve previously argued, if a forum for discussion is open to anyone making any claim, the truth will not automatically win out—in fact, it usually won’t. There are innumerable cheap debating tricks to suppress true information in favor of lies, propaganda, and BS. Back in the day, creationists had most of them down to a science, as it were. And if tricks aren’t enough, there’s always simply shouting someone down, or forcing them to clam up with harassment or threats.
Veterans of internet forums, blog comments sections, or even just classroom discussions know that moderation is absolutely indispensable for any kind of rational discussion. Indeed, it is a priori impossible not to have moderation, because if there are no explicit rules, de facto rules will be created by the most influential community members—online, very often Nazi trolls who harass everyone else into submission or leaving.
Even before Musk Twitter was already biased towards the loudest and most extreme voices. Any algorithm-based platform that prioritizes “engagement” will work like that, and tend to become a factory churning out clout-chasing liars and morons. But the prior management at least had a grudging commitment to tamp down racist abuse and to promote factually verifiable information. Most of the worst Nazis were kicked off in the mid-2010s, and most of the worst anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists were kicked off in 2021.
But now Musk has brought them back and fired nearly all of Twitter’s moderation staff. What moderation still happens is largely based on his erratic whims—mainly, that there should be more Nazis and vaccine deniers on the platform, and that more users should have to look at his own atrocious posts. That’s conservative free speech utopia for you: leftists are muzzled, and everyone remaining is strapped into a Ludovico Technique apparatus to look at years-old stolen Reddit memes.
Just to be clear, the First Amendment is a good thing. America doesn’t need speech codes or hair-trigger libel laws like those in the U.K., where billionaires use legal threats to stifle criticism. But one thing that would dramatically improve the quality of discourse in this country—and actually expand the freedom of speech enjoyed by the public—would be confiscatory taxation of the rich. It should not be possible for any one person to buy up a central artery of global communications.
