Elon Musk Is Right

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Sunday, December 11, 2022

 

A more transparent Twitter will be a better Twitter.

Forget, for a moment, the arguments over the First Amendment and Section 230, and look at the matter from the perspective of the consumer. Twitter is a business, and I am a customer, and from the perspective of a customer, I naturally prefer clarity to murkiness. As a daily user of the product, I gain nothing from opacity, or from complexity, or from caprice, because they all make the service worse for me. If I follow someone, I want to see their tweets. If I search for someone, I want to find their account. If a given topic or person or claim is trending, I want to know about it without its being filtered through the personal predilections of other people. Because Twitter is a platform on which people write, I want the staff who work there to be instinctively supportive of free expression, skeptical of government pressure, and loathe to tip the scales in either direction. And if, for whatever reason, some superintendence of my conversations is deemed necessary, I want to know about it without euphemisms.

 

If my account has been suppressed wholesale, I want to be told that. If my tweet is too offensive to be shared widely, I want to be informed of it. If I am no longer permitted to use the platform — whether temporarily or permanently — I want to be apprised of which rules I have broken and why. I have no legal or constitutional right to any of these provisions, nor would I claim one. Twitter is a private company, and I would like to keep it that way. But to accept that I cannot recruit the state to my side is not to shed all my opinions, and, as a user, I have a whole bunch of opinions to share.

 

Since it was confirmed that Twitter’s airily named “Trust and Safety” department has, indeed, been micromanaging users, the preferred response from the legacy media — many of whose journalists had flatly rejected the idea until about last week — has been to pivot. Overnight, “That’s a conspiracy theory” became “Everyone knew that — and, anyway, why do you care?” But not everyone did know it, and, if they did, they’d have had good reason to care. Evidently, Twitter understood this, because, in 2018, it went out of its way to deny that it was playing games with users’ visibility. “People are asking us if we shadow ban,” Vijaya Gadde and Kayvon Beykpour wrote in a company blog post. “We do not.” This wasn’t true.

 

After a while, this becomes a simple numbers game. It may well be the case that the previous denizens of Twitter’s many moderation departments believed in earnest that they were doing good work. But most Americans do not share their presumptions. Last month, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, wrote in the New York Times that “the Cornell professor Tarleton Gillespie called teams like mine the ‘custodians of the internet.’” Clearly, Roth was proud of this description, which he followed up with the self-important declaration that “the work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious.” In Silicon Valley, in academia, and in some parts of corporate America, this sort of talk is de rigueur. Everywhere else, it inspires contempt and derisive laughter. A Twitter that fires the scolds is a Twitter that will grow. Why? Because the scolds are outnumbered 50-to-one.

 

Which is all to say that Elon Musk ought to ignore the howls of complaint from the woke, reject the calls for government regulation from the right, and have some well-deserved faith in his own instincts as to what his customer base is looking for. The average Twitter user is not looking to have his experience micromanaged by custodians, or to have his output sanitized by America’s meticulous arbiters of taste; he just wants to get on with his day. If a user in his orbit is posting death threats or pornography or incontestably illegal material, he won’t object to that user’s being removed, but, in spite of the metastasizing definition of “safe,” he does not see that form of supervision as a license for ideological meddling. Undergirding the First Amendment is the presumption that the institutions that it does not reach will encourage speech of their own volition. Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter largely reflects that presumption. As a consumer, I can tell him he’s correct.