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How Elon Musk might shift Twitter content moderation

Brookings: “…So, what is Musk likely to do with Twitter? He presents himself as a philanthropic custodian of a public resource. In an onstage interview at the TED2022 conference, Musk said, “this isn’t a way to make money. My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don’t care about the economics at all.” He appears to want to allow all legal speech on the platform and this has prompted concerns that he will weaken content moderation in the name of free speech. But Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. sums up the current situation that “Twitter has crossed the river of no return in “moderating” the content that appears on its service—it can’t allow untrammeled free expression.” The fact that someone has to moderate content on Twitter, however, does not mean that Twitter has to do it. Musk could turn the job over to Twitter users or third parties. Influential neo-right blogger Curtis Yandex has urged Musk to adopt a user curation approach to content moderation. The new Twitter under Musk, he says, must censor “all content prohibited by law in all jurisdictions that prohibit it.” For content moderation and algorithmic recommendation of legal speech, Yandex urges Musk to seek to identify hate speech and other speech users might not want to see and then give users the tools to block it if they want. The goal should be to arrange content moderation and algorithmic recommendation to give users what they want, to make their experiences “as rich and pleasant as possible.”…

See also The Conversation – Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter could make its misinformation problems worse

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