Pivotal elections in Brazil and the United States will present an early test to Twitter‘s new owner Elon Musk and his promise to ease up on the platform’s policies on misinformation.
Voters in both nations have already faced a torrent of misleading claims about candidates, issues and voting. That torrent could become a deluge if Musk makes good on his vows to roll back Twitter’s rules just as millions of voters prepare to cast a ballot.
“This is the most critical time for this work, right before an election,” said Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who has been monitoring the online response to Musk’s purchase. “We’re going to see a test run with the election in Brazil this Sunday, when we’ll see how bad things get.”
Even if Musk waits until after the elections to make changes, his decision to fire the executive in charge of content moderation raises questions about the company’s ability to combat misinformation and extremist content linked to deepening distrust in democracy.
Musk, the world’s richest man, hasn’t detailed his plans for Twitter, which he purchased this week for $44 billion. But he has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and has said the platform should tolerate any content that is legally permissible.
That’s a threshold that varies widely among countries. In the U.S., it would cover misleading content about vaccines or elections as well as Holocaust denialism and hate speech.
He’s also said he disagreed with Twitter’s decision to banish Donald Trump after the ex-president’s lies about the 2020 election helped spur the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Yet Musk has also signaled that he’d consider some level of moderation, as he did this week when he said he didn’t want Twitter to become a “ free-for-all hellscape.”
On Friday, Musk announced the creation of a committee to review Twitter’s policies on content moderation and the reinstatement of suspended accounts. “No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes,” Musk tweeted.
One of Musk’s first moves as Twitter’s owner was to fire top leaders at the platform, including chief legal counsel Vijaya Gadde, who had overseen Twitter’s content moderation and safety efforts.
Gadde’s departure is not only a blow to Twitter’s current election efforts, but a sign of where Musk may take…
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