No, You’re Not Losing Your Free Speech — Even If It Has Limits
Social media needs to be regulated. Right now, users are the last line of defense, and it’s not working.
So, Elon Musk wants Twitter. But not to improve it and make it safer. Not to make it something other than a platform that facilitates for people to fight with others around the world and send death threats to people they’ve never met.
As if speech on Twitter wasn’t already quite free.
Why are people so outraged about Elon Musk wanting to just improve Twitter and guarantee free speech? Maybe because that’s probably not his goal, and it doesn’t look like Musk actually knows what he’s talking about.
Many smarter brains than mine have already done a great job at pointing out instances in which Elon Musk has shown he’s actually not a proponent of free speech when it’s against him or his companies, so I don’t think I need to get into it.
Twitter is also far from being a public square where every citizen participates. It’s still a much smaller platform than Facebook or Instagram with its approximately 300 million users, although people in tech, journalism and politics often seem to forget about this. It’s an opinion bubble most people don’t care about.
But while the idea for this story was sparked by Musk, my beef right now is more general: it’s with the whole idea of any regulations placed on communication being an unacceptable, authoritarian measure.
My point is that freedom of speech, like any freedom, isn’t total. It comes with limits and responsibilities. We’ve had these kinds of limits before. It’s just that we haven’t set them in a situation where everyone creates content, and that content is viralized by algorithms designed to promote engagement, before now.
Letter from a Reader
When I was a kid, the only way you had of influencing public opinion was sending a letter to your local newspaper or your favorite magazine and hoping that it would get published. Maybe a protest if the issue was serious, but generally Finns are not big on taking their complaints to the streets. It’s too…
