It cannot be right that Musk can sow discord without personal risk. He’s a jetsetter: perhaps fear of unexpected detention will concentrate his mind
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The way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he’s made his own. We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump’s furious posts after his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The aftermath of that episode saw the then president suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even, to the dismay of those hoping to mood-board the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, Pinterest.
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This time is likely to be different, not least because the person agitating the social media furore, Elon Musk, owns the platform he is using.
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On Monday, the two men meet. Musk is having a live conversation with the former president, promising “entertainment guaranteed”.
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I worked at Twitter for most of Trump’s presidential term, serving as the most senior executive outside the US. It was clear from my eight years at the platform that there is something lost in translation between British interpretations of free speech and the arguments parroted by those who adopt a US libertarian interpretation of the concept.
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Being the British office of a US operation gave us a daily insight into the almost religious rat-a-tat repetition defence of free speech. The founding general counsel of Twitter, Alex Macgillivray, once described the business as being the “free speech wing of the Free Speech party”. In the US, there’s often a myopic sense that its freedoms don’t exist in the rest of the world, but in the UK 1998 Human Rights Act, article 10 enshrines freedom of speech. Critically, there is a recognition that free expression carries with it a duty of responsibility. The UK law requires that such free speech is not used to incite criminality or spread hatred.
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For US-based tech firms, the concept of “free speech” is perceived somewhat differently. In my time working under a significantly more enlightened regime at Twitter, it was quickly clear to the team in London that the notion of “free speech” espoused in San Francisco wasn’t always focused on creating the kind of utopian world you might casually imagine. We’d regularly see that there was a dark side to the idea that anyone could say anything; time and time again, it led to a minority group (a subset of straight white males) being able to aggressively target large portions of the rest of society, including women, the LBGTQ+ community and ethnic minorities.
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The worst part was that, left unchecked, this group ruined the experience of the platform for everyone else. It’s hard to convince people now who didn’t use the product during happier days, through events such as the London 2012 Olympics or early X Factor, but Twitter used to be joyously good fun to use. A laissez-faire approach to abuse sadly allowed much of the carefree humour to be scared off. As much as X/Twitter loves framing itself as the “global town square”, such common spaces only thrive when everyone knows antisocial behaviour isn’t going to be tolerated.
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Working in the UK office was a little like working in a parliamentary system without a written constitution. There was a vague sense that, rather than rules and regulations holding the organisation to account, the platform would be constrained by outside expectations.
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For example, during flare-ups in 2013 when prominent female users were being aggressively subjected to rape threats and threats of violence, the only thing that helped the UK office get the attention of our San Francisco HQ was the mention that advertisers were contemplating boycotting the platform. Democracies shouldn’t be left looking at leveraging the soft power of boycotts, not least because in the case of X, most advertisers have long gone.
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As someone who worked not only at Twitter but also at YouTube as it came to terms with dealing with its horrible abuse problems, I remain convinced that a social media platform can create behavioural norms that enable polite discussion. Instagram is certainly significantly more civil, and TikTok creators regularly tell their audience that they’ve just served a time-out because the content they posted crossed a line. But to operate a nicer place requires resources – you need to create systems and you need to staff that infrastructure. Whether it was politicians receiving personal threats, footballers having racism spat at them, or users saying they’d been called “a Jewish cunt”, the resources were never given to prove the promise of something better. The government can hold platforms accountable for this – for instance, asking them to confirm the number of UK-based employees in areas like user safety and enforcement.