Twitter's Free Speech Dilemma

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now that we're done with the Mall in Boston, and I want to mention a program note. We're planning a special for tomorrow one week after the election. Is the Trump threat to electoral democracy over now that just about every election denier in a key swing state election at the state level lost and Republican losers around the country are conceding not making up claims of election fraud that we're seeing? Also Trump's Tuesday announcement, tomorrow announcement whatever that is, is that going to be affected by that? Also tomorrow we'll discuss what normal policy preference is. That is things that are not enabling election denialism we learn that people have from the results nationally as well as in New York which seemed to buck the national trend in certain respects and move more to the right.

How right or wrong were the polls? There's so much trouble with polling in 2022. The red wave that was predicted never materialized, but maybe the pollsters actually saw that fading away in the last days before the election. We'll talk about the return of normal politics. Question mark. The trouble or not trouble with polls and more on a one week later post-election special here on the show tomorrow. For right now one thing we know about Elon Musk's brief reign at Twitter so far, it hasn't been boring. It's been a soap opera wrapped in a social media platform.

If you missed it over the weekend, Musk's first big, high profile product launch was put on pause, those blue check marks you could buy for 7.99 a month to confer some verified status. We'll explain what that means for those of you who don't know. The Washington Post headline on this, for example, was Elon Musk's first big Twitter product paused after fake accounts spread. Says, "Twitter accounts impersonating celebrities and politicians spread on the site after the company rolled out paid check marks." Here's one example of the fake account chaos. This one's from the sports world.

This is from the Entrepreneur magazine. The headline is How one 19-year-old trolled thousands of NFL fans before being suspended under Elon Musk's regime. The teenager created a fake account pretending to be NFL analyst Adam Schefter. There was that. For those of you who don't follow football, Adam Schefter is really big in football media. I read that someone created a fake verified Lebron James account too and was faking people out with that. Then there was this episode of soap opera wrapped in a social media platform that involved Musk and Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee.

This version is from the tech site Gizmodo. It says, "Markey's Beef with Musk began last Friday when the Democratic senator tweeted at the billionaire and informed him that a Washington Post reporter was able to create a verified account that impersonated him," impersonated Markey. The senator attached a letter asking Musk to explain how this had happened and to address the chaos going on with impersonation and Twitter's paid blue check marks. In the letter Markey said the billionaire had until November 25th to respond to his questions in writing.

It continues, "Musk, as everyone knows, doesn't take criticism too well and decided to mess with Markey instead of addressing the senator's concerns." Musk tweeted, "Perhaps it is because your real account sounds like a parody and why does your profile picture have a mask?" That's what Musk tweeted back at Senator Markey after he was victimized by an impersonator site under the new rules. It says, "Markey didn't respond well to Musk strolling and proceeded to point out some of the many problems his companies are in." "One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree. Auto Safety Watchdog, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is investigating another for killing people," the Senator tweeted at Musk last Sunday, "and you're spending your time picking fights online. Fix your companies or Congress will."

That article goes on from there. If this is a soap opera wrapped in a social media platform on one level, it's also a free speech debate wrapped in a business story or maybe a business story wrapped in a free speech debate. Musk himself retweeted one of those false conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi. Hey, free speech. He later deleted it. Not a good look for the head of the company to have to delete a disinformation tweet, but hey, free speech. Some major advertisers, as you probably heard by now, including General Motors and Audi and Pfizer, United Airlines, General Mills, have suspended their Twitter advertising. A headline in Fortune Magazine says, "Companies are already pulling ads off Twitter because of hate speech concerns."

A headline on Business Insider, "Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter has translated into huge user growth for upstart social media platforms like Mastodon and Tumbler according to new data." Now, there are also adjunct stories here worth noting amid the chaos at Twitter. It's not the only tech company undergoing financial shocks right now. Facebook's parent company has announced 11,000 layoffs and the crypto industry is crashing so badly that one of the industry's biggest stars, Sam Bankman Freed, had to put his company FTX into bankruptcy. Reports are that he personally lost 94% of his investment.

Now, that's not quite a richest to drag story as he's reportedly still worth a little less than a billion dollars. CNBC quotes experts who say this could be the beginning of the end of cryptocurrency. We'll see. With us now, Neiay Patel, editor in chief of the tech site The Verge and host of the podcast Decoder, and Suzanne Nossel, Chief Chief Executive of the Free Speech Organization, Pan America. She has an LA Times op ed called How Elon Musk's Plans for Twitter Could Threaten Free Speech. Suzanne, welcome back. Nilay, welcome to WNYC.

Nilay Patel: Thanks for having us.

Suzanne Nossel: Hi, Bye.

Brian: Listeners help us report this story. One way you can help is if you have already started using other social media platforms like Mastodon or Tumbler or any other that you weren't using before. 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. Are you making like General Motors and General Mills and exiting the Twitter platform for some other stage to express yourself or follow anyone? Is it because of how Musk will treat hate speech and disinformation? 212-433-9692. Also, if you use Twitter, are you seeing anything change that you want to describe? Have you been fooled by any fake verified accounts or anything else you want to say or asked? 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692.

You can tweet us @BrianLehrer. Nilay, can you explain to listeners who are not following the soap opera closely what happened with the so-called verified accounts? What were they originally, what it must change them into, and why has he now put that change on pause?

Nilay: Sure. The original purpose of the verified accounts was not really for the people who were verified, it was for the users of Twitter to know that the tweets they were reading came from the people that purported to be sending them. Twitter would go around to media organizations, to big companies, to governments around the world and say, "Hey, you've got a Twitter account. Do you, the Secretary of state of Arizona, want a blue check mark by your account so that people know when you're tweeting it's actually you so they can trust this information?" They handed out the check marks for free with a process that was basically chaotic.

No one ever really knew how it worked. Twitter paused it several times to try to rework it. Effectively it was just a spreadsheet that Twitter maintained according to some rules that nobody could really understand. Now, the right wing media has always hated the blue check marks because journalists, national organizations, governments tend to traffic in facts and maybe the right wing media doesn't love that so much. There's always been this war against the blue checks, against objective reality on Twitter. Elon Musk got into that war, said, "You know what? I'm going to sell the blue check marks for $8 a month. Anyone can have one, power to the people."

The problem is that buying a blue check mark quickly enables you to co-opt the original purpose of blue check mark which is to look like the verified speaker of some information. That's how you immediately ran into impersonation problems where fake Eli Lilly accounts, fake Tesla accounts were able to very quickly spread false information and, in Eli Lilly's case, bring billions of dollars [unintelligible 00:10:00].

Brian: What do you see as the next potential moves? This is all in limbo right now. He didn't admit failure and say, "No, this ability to buy a verified check mark and therefore make it look like you are actually a United States senator when you're not, that wasn't working." Is he just not going to do that anymore and go back to the way it was or what are the potential next steps here?

Nilay: The potential next step is already out. It has been released and then pulled back and released again, is to go back to the original check mark and to add a badge where Twitter itself decides who is real and who is fake and adds a label to those accounts. They rolled out another check mark. It's gray, it says, "Official." Elon pulled that back. He said, "I killed it, this is dumb." Then after the wave of impersonations, they added it back. Then Elon tweeted over the weekend that he doesn't see any solution but for Twitter to become the arbiter of these official check marks and of the affiliations of people with these organizations.

In many cases what we're seeing is just classic hubris. You go into an organization, you think everything they've ever done is stupid. You change it, you realize, "There are a lot of reasons for things to be done this way," and you end up right back where you started.

Brian: Suzanne Nossel, you are an apostle of free speech at PEN America. As the CEO, you're known to some as pretty close to a free speech absolutist, but your LA Times Op-Ed is called How Elon Musk's plans for Twitter could threaten free speech. That of course is even though what he's getting known for is, "I'm going to restore free speech to Twitter." You posed the central question to yourself in the piece. You write, "How can disinformation threaten free speech if it is a form of free speech?" What's your answer to yourself?

Suzanne: Thanks. Well, look, I think we have to take a step back and consider why it is that we protect free speech in the first place, be it in the First Amendment or in international law. It's not just so that you can sound off where and when and as loudly as you want into the ether or into the forest. It's actually because free speech has been recognized as a social and democratic good. Free speech allows us to persuade other people to our point of view. It allows us to ferret out the best ideas, to separate fact from falsehood, to drive forward policy discussions, to catalyze creativity and innovation in the economy and in the arts.

If you think about all of those dividends that derive from free speech then it becomes clear that in a marketplace that is flooded with disinformation and, as we're seeing in Twitter right now, impersonation, where you don't know the veracity of anything you see. You don't know what you can trust, who is messaging to you and for what reasons and motives. All of those valuable functions of a marketplace of ideas and of free speech itself start to be undercut. You can't separate fact from falsehood. You can't see the best ideas rise to the foreground. You can't persuade other people of your compelling point of view because they don't believe you, they think you're an imposter.

If you look at the purposes of free speech, you recognize that particularly online and algorithmically engagement-based business models, that a simple free-for-all does not yield those dividends. That in order to realize the benefits of free speech, which I think can be incredibly potent online and on social media, more is required. It is not just a free-for-all hellscape, as Elon has called it. I think it's right that he's unfortunately having to learn this for himself, even though many people, myself included, tried to warn him.

Brian: Do you think, Suzanne, that Twitter before Musk had become too restrictive of free speech, even if you are criticizing him now for the way he's trying to change it?

Suzanne: I think it's really difficult to say precisely where the line should be drawn on issues like hateful speech and online harassment. You end up in very fact-specific determinations. The meaning of words is different in different countries, different dialects. I think you can argue about that. Content moderation systems can always be improved. It still remains, on all of these platforms, very much a work in progress. It's still a new art and an art and not a science. I think there's certainly room for improvement but, as we're learning, there's also room for things to get a lot worse and for the fundamental value of Twitter to potentially just wither away, which I worry that we are witnessing.

Brian: Nilay, explain from your perspective as a tech reporter with The Verge why these advertisers are pulling out? They're expressing concerns about being displayed next to hate speech, how does that work?

Nilay: I think for all of our concerns about free speech on a platform like Twitter, we have to recognize it's a nakedly capitalistic enterprise. It's a business that's trying to make money and all of its money, all of its revenue comes from advertisers. Almost 80, 90% of its revenue comes from advertisers and it's not a lot of money. Twitter is one of the smallest social networks, 229 million, maybe if Musk has succeeded in growing maybe 300 million monetizable daily active users. Facebook is 2 billion users, TikTok is over a billion users. Twitter is really small and it doesn't make a lot of money compared to those platforms.

Advertisers are rightfully saying, "Hey, it's a global economic slowdown. We have budgets, we have no idea what's going on in this platform." We reported at Omnicom, one of the biggest ad agency holding companies in the world, sent a letter recommending pausing all spend on Twitter until Twitter could provide assurances that it had control over its platform and brand safety issues not showing up next to hate speech were firmly in hand. They said that one of the reasons we don't have that assurance is because all the people we know there, all the senior executives, have been fired.

They're waiting to see who is in charge and whether they can get control over the Twitter platform before they bring money back to Twitter. That is accelerated in a very serious way the crunch Elon faces because the advertising market is biggest in the fourth quarter. If he's not going to make the money in a fourth quarter, he's not going to make the money against the World Cup, he's not going to make the money against the Super Bowl, he's got to accelerate revenue or he is going to crash his thing off a cliff.

Brian: Musk has blamed pressure from political activists for these companies pulling their ads. How much do you see that?

Nilay: That's just part of American life. I'm sure that's free speech. That's how it goes, especially if you're in the business of making money. You cannot force advertisers to spend money on your platform. You cannot force advertisers not to listen to the group so would pressure them into not spending money. You have to make a product that is compelling enough for them to buy. Fundamentally, his complaints about activists and advertisers and free speech are nonsensical on their face because they're simply not buying what he's selling.

Brian: Suzanne, is that another dilemma for you at any level? Yes, it's free speech to advocate for companies not to associate themselves with hate but if companies feel chilled by political pressure not to promote their products as will make them profits, is that anti-free speech by your lights?

Suzanne: I don't think it's anti-free speech to make the argument that advertisers for their own reasons of reputation and brand equity ought not to be adjacent to certain kinds of content. That's very natural and normal. You wouldn't have these advertisers in a porn magazine for example or advertising in a white supremacist platform. I think pointing that out is very legitimate. It's an effort to put pressure on the platform to behave responsibly in terms of controlling some of the worst kinds of firms that can be inimical to free speech. We do a lot of work at PEN America on the issues of disinformation and online harassment.

Online harassment, it's the same thing. It's largely protected by the First Amendment and yet if it runs rampant, people are chased off these platforms. They are intimidated, they're harangued and harassed. Those threats can manifest in the physical world. To be able to have a robust civic square, which is what Elon says he wants, you have to have some guardrails in place. I think advertisers are within their rights to say there are environments we do and don't want to be in. I don't think that means all boycotts. When it comes to cultural and academic boycotts, I think that's different and we take a different position on this.

I think this is a robust debate about what the future of Twitter should be. All the stakeholders, and including particularly the advertisers who drive the revenue, are going to have some say in that.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Roxanne in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi Rakhine.

Rakhine: Good morning. I have a hard time with free speech. I always thought I was a proponent of free speech but it seems that in this day and age there's less civility and people don't listen, they don't take it as a different point of view. Anyone can say anything, and as soon as they hear it, if it's something they want to believe, it's the truth to them, We're not considerate. We don't research, we don't look it up. All they do is hear it. One last point is, I feel like as I was sitting here waiting, I thought, you know that old saying, a lie makes it around the world how many times before the truth even gets out of bed? It seems like this has been a problem for a very long time. I'm feeling more and more like we do have to curtail some of this misinformation that's out there.

Brian: Who should be the arbiter, Rakhine?

Rakhine: I'm starting to feel more and more that there should be these companies, these platforms that put out the information, somehow there has to be a controlling board or there has to be a review board that really looks at information and what's true and what's harmful. I don't know. I agree, it's a dilemma. It reminds me of the Second Amendment fight where, "You can't ban a single gun because, God forbid, that's a slippery slope, then everything will be banned." I feel like those of us who support free speech are starting to sound like that a little bit. "No, you can't ban any kind of speech because where does that lead to?"

Brian: Rakhine, thank you very much. Maybe related, Joel in Newark, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joel.

Joel: Good morning. I want to say that there's a misguided notion of what free speech is constituted by. It's a government action against speech which plays into free speech and it's problems. It's not private companies.

Brian: That's true, constitutionally, that's the First Amendment. It's only restrictive of the government censoring free speech.

Joel: Right. You asked the question about who should sort this out, and I would suggest that judges and juries in libel and slander actions sort this out. Now, could Elon Musk be sued for that outrageous libel that he put forward against Paul Pelosi? Why should he not? Why should these companies have this extra protection that the federal statutes give them? I don't even understand exactly how it works, but I think judges and juries should decide these things. I think that's also true in the gun regulation area. Judges and juries should be considering damage suits in this context. There is no reason for these companies to have this federal shield.

Brian: Joel, thank you very much. Suzanne, I'm not sure if you're a lawyer there, as CEO of the free speech organization Pen America, and we don't have time to go down this rabbit hole, but there's a difference between passing laws against free speech and what Joel is bringing up there, which is civil court. How juries might award damages in lawsuits brought by, in the potential example he cites Paul Pelosi after being slandered, allegedly, by Elon Musk on Twitter. Then it's like a jury of your peers decides. Even libertarians think that civil court is better than government regulation because it's regular citizens and panels to decide who's harmed to. I don't know if you have a take on that briefly.

Suzanne: Sure, I am a lawyer by training, Brian. Look, the way that works is that there are certain limitations on the first amendment. We have libel and slander and defamation laws. If you knowingly destroy someone's reputation, that can be a cause of action. You can be sued for that. There's an underlying law, there's an underlying government regulation that is at work now. The individual facts of a given case will be adjudicated by a judge and a jury. I think what the caller is alluding to is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that internet platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Google, they cannot be sued for content that users post on their platforms.

Elon Musk, in relation to the Paul Pelosi tweet, conceivably could be sued. He's not a bad target. He has very deep pockets. What you cannot do right now under the law is sue Twitter for that. If some ordinary individual who doesn't have a lot of money to their name were to post something defamatory, you could go after that individual, but you couldn't recoup very much even though your damages, the harm your reputation, might be grave.

Brian: You couldn't sue them for, let's say, flipping an election because they allowed so much disinformation, just about anything going on in the country to proliferate on their site without moderation?

Suzanne: There's a Supreme Court case now that will look at whether algorithmic amplification is also protected by Section 230. That's something that the lower courts have debated, and that's going to be a very consequential decision. If algorithms played a role, it's conceivable that that liability shield does not apply.

Brian: As people become alienated from Twitter, Nilay, give us a quick take on the alternatives. I'm noticing that one of the listeners who tweeted a comment at us during this conversation did tweet at us, but also included his Mastodon handle. That's the first time I've ever seen that. Something has changed as of today with at least one listener. Tell us about other social media platforms that are reportedly benefiting from Twitter's current troubles. For example, for people who never heard of it, what is Mastodon?

Nilay: Master is a decentralized social network. It's more like email than one of these centrally controlled social media companies. People set up servers. You can send messages between the servers. You can join a server. Your experience of Mastodon, if you use one of the many apps available, does look a lot like Twitter. You just aren't in the control of a single company or individual to move between servers as you like, just so you can with email. Mastodonis not big. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people on it right now but it is growing. It seems to be where people leaving Twitter are going or what they're relying on.

I think the appeal is that you're not going from one company to another company. You're going from one company to a protocol or an open-source system. I think that there's something to be said for that. At this moment in time, when so many of the large companies and platforms that we have ride on the Internet over the past decade or more are falling on hard times, I think there is an interest in maybe some new ideas in the systems. I would just caution everybody, Twitter leaving, I keep reminding people of this. It is small. We're talking 200, 300 million users a day. That is a drop in the bucket like Facebook and YouTube and TikTok. You're going to see people move, but it's not going to blip the needle for any of the scaled platforms really at all.

Brian: Right, but Facebook's parent company is also laying off 11,000 people. You have 30 seconds left in the segment but do you see some of the tech giants as more insulated from this downturn than others? Google and Apple and Amazon are all in very different kinds of businesses from Facebook and Twitter.

Nilay: That's true. I would remind people, just to highlight how small Twitter is. Twitter makes about $4 million or $5 million a year in revenue. Mark Zuckerberg is going to save that just by cutting those 11,000 people at Meta. Just by making his way off, he has created more profit, more upside for himself than if he absorbed all of Twitter's money. It is important to keep in mind the scale of Twitter has outside irrelevant stuff. The media has outsized relevance in politics, but the actual scale is really small. On the other side, today Tim Cook said he was going to slow hiring at Apple.

We've seen the cuts at Meta, we've seen some slowdowns at Google. All of these companies dramatically invested during the pandemic. They grew faster than they had ever grown before because they thought that the secular shifts in the economy and how we behave in the pandemic were permanent. They thought, "Everyone's going to work remote all the time. This huge boom in PC sales will persist. The market for webcams will continue to grow. The market for our conference software, we're all going to shop online forever." As that has drifted back towards the mean and even to 2019 levels, not even 2021 levels, back to where we were, those huge investments aren't paying off the way they thought they would. I think they're reverting to the mean as well.

Brian: Nilay Patel, editor in chief of the tech site The Verge and host of the podcast Decoder and Suzanne Nossel, CEO of Pen America. Thank you both for joining us. Very important conversation.

 

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