In the week since entrepreneur billionaire Elon Musk took full control of Twitter, his actions have offered little comfort to those concerned about a wealthy, powerful, capricious man overseeing the world’s most significant, impactful social media communications channel.
Musk initially rowed back on early signals that Twitter would become a minimally moderated, free speech free-for-all. His Twitter would, after all, respect local laws on free speech, he said. And one of his first tweets as Twitter’s new owner was a pledge to make no immediate changes to content moderation or on reinstating banned Twitter users, such as Donald Trump. Instead, Musk would be creating a “content oversight board” to take, or perhaps attempt to offload his responsibility for, such decisions.
So far, so somewhat reassuring, even if such steps were widely viewed as a sop to clients nervous about having their advertisements appearing next to unmoderated content. And then, right on cue, Musk himself posted a tweet that questioned the circumstances of the hammer attack on US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
Eventually, his tweet was deleted. But then Musk demolished much of Twitter’s team that works to protect elections against disinformation campaigns, just ahead of the US midterm elections. And now he’s instigating massive layoffs – targeting half the company’s employees – including many in Dublin – by callously firing them via email. The Taoiseach and other senior politicians expressed concern about the way this was done.
Taken only from a business perspective, these moves appear alarmingly irrational, alienating both badly needed advertisers for the financially over-leveraged site, and its users, many of whom are starting to seek other options. Twitter may seem too big to fail. But the history of online communications networks is one of successive waves of the next big thing, not long-term domination. And the world is still left with the conundrum of how best to manage privately controlled communication networks that become mainstream communications infrastructure.