10 Leaders The Economist April 30th 2022
S
weeping statementsaboutthefutureofhumanitydonot
usually feature in discussions about leveraged buyouts. But
Elon Musk has never felt bound by convention. Asked about his
plans to buy Twitter, a social network, and take it private—
which were approved by the firm's board on April 25th—he went
straight for the big idea. “My strong intuitive sense is that having
a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclu
sive is extremely important to the future of civilisation. I don’t
care about the economics at all.”
Compared with its rivals—Facebook, Instagram and TikTok—
Twitter is a minnow. But the deal matters. One reason is that
Twitter’s size belies its importance. As a haunt of politicians,
pundits and wonks, it does much to set the political weather—a
digital “public square”, as Mr Musk put it.
Another is that Mr Musk made his name and his fortune by
upending industries. This time, he will be grappling with a knot
ty problem of keen interest to governments around the world—
how to regulate speech online. Most prescribe ever more rules.
But Mr Musk wants to go the other way, removing restrictions
instead of imposing new ones. The operators of other big social
networks will be watching the experiment with interest.
At first blush, Mr Musk—best known for electric cars and re
usable rockets—seems an unlikely socialmedia mogul. But a
closer look suggests his acquisition of Twitter
fits his approach to business. Mr Musk, a pas
sionate engineer, likes to take poorly perform
ing technologies and improve them. Tesla tore
up the car industry’s rule book by replacing pet
rol with electricity, ditching dealerships and
treating cars as computers. SpaceX proved that
a hungry, movefastandbreakthings startup
run on a relative shoestring could outperform
aerospace giants grown cautious and fat on the back of generous
government contracts. Both firms were dismissed by bigger in
cumbents—until one day they weren’t.
All that engineering and disruption is animated by Mr Musk’s
own, sometimes idiosyncratic conception of the social good.
Tesla’s purpose is to prod the world more quickly towards a car
bonfree economy (a goal vindicated by the speed at which other
carmakers are now pivoting to electric vehicles). SpaceX’s ambi
tion is so grandiose some commentators struggle to believe that
Mr Musk is sincere: to establish a human presence on Mars,
something that, were a catastrophe to befall Earth, might one
day prove to have been an insurance policy for civilisation.
Assume that Mr Musk really is ready to spend billions of dol
lars of his own money to secure the “future of civilisation”
(though he has a break clause should he get cold feet). The ques
tion is whether his vision of free speech on Twitter is sensible.
Twitter fits the pattern of Tesla and SpaceX, offering Mr Musk
another complex engineering system to tinker with, and a grand
reason for doing so. Social media deploy algorithms to highlight
“engaging” content, using a thicket of rules that try to mitigate
the worst sideeffects, the better to sell users to advertisers. It is a
business model full of inconsistencies and unexamined trade
offs that looks ripe for disruption. That Mr Musk wants to be itsagentisperhapsnosurprise,forhecuthisentrepreneurial teeth
in the 1990s, when technolibertarianism and anticensorship
were the internet’s animating ideas.
The fact that Mr Musk is a billionaire should not disqualify
him from owning an important media firm. He has already set
out some ideas for Twitter, many of them cautious and sensible.
The resulting fuss shows how illiberal much online opinion has
become. He wants fewer outright bans and more temporary sus
pensions. Users should prove they are not bots. When in doubt,
err on the side of leaving tweets up, not taking them down.
More significant, he thinks the cogs and ratchets of Twitter’s
recommendation algorithm, which decides which tweets a user
sees, should be public. Researchers could examine it; other pro
grammers could tweak it. A version less prone to pushing “en
gaging” content—which, in practice, often means tweets that are
enraging, controversial or plain daft—could lower the tempera
ture of the entire platform, making the job of moderation easier
and possibly leading to debate that is more thoughtful. Or per
haps Twitter could become an open platform, where different
users may choose one of many different thirdparty algo
rithms—or none at all—according to their taste. Content moder
ation is the messy product of political and social pressures. It
will be fascinating to see how easily it succumbs to engineering.
Mr Musk will not have an entirely free hand.
Australia, Britain, the eu and India, have all
been working on techregulation. Thierry Bre
ton, a senior euofficial, noted that “It’s not [Mr
Musk’s] rules that will apply here.” Mr Musk’s
other investors are nervous. The more time he
devotes to Twitter, the less he will have for his
other ventures. Shares in Tesla fell by 12% after
news of the Twitter deal.
Mr Musk’s personality poses a big risk. He is clever, driven
and ferociously hardworking. He can also be puerile and vin
dictive, traits on display in 2018 when he accused a British cave
rescue expert, with no evidence, of being a “pedo guy”. Such out
bursts are one thing coming from a Twitter user with a big fol
lowing. But when he is the owner, they will raise questions
about whether he will be able to resist the temptation to exploit
his new position to pursue his own obsessions and vendettas. The bird and the oak tree
This newspaper shares Mr Musk’s freespeech convictions. No
body has a monopoly on wisdom. Experts are sometimes wrong
and blowhards sometimes right. Even in the internet age, the
best response to a bad argument is a better one. Moderation on
many platforms has become heavyhanded and arbitrarily en
forced. If Mr Musk’s talent for shaking up industries can help cut
the Gordian knot of online speech, everyone will benefit.
But we are also keen on another liberal principle, that institu
tions should be bigger than the person running them. Mr Musk
can set new rules, but he should be seen to play no role in enforc
ing them. If he really wants to convince users that he will be an
impartial guardian of his “digital public square”, hecouldimple
ment his reforms—and then freeze his own account.nThe world’s best-known engineer takes on the problem of free speech. We hope he succeedsThe techno-king of Twitter
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