So much for free-speech absolutism.
As of this writing, Mr. Musk was still in charge — but a poll he conducted asking whether he should resign as Twitter chief returned a solid majority of yeses. No matter what he decides, Twitter would remain his property, and the company’s imperative would be the same: Revive Twitter as a forum and as a business by laying ground rules that apply to all, enforcing them fairly, and informing the community when and how that happens. That is, the opposite of what Mr. Musk has done.
If there’s anything to learn from the Musk era at Twitter, it’s that the free-speech absolutism Mr. Musk claimed to espouse is untenable as a guiding principle. Those running social media sites will inevitably find something they don’t want on their property. Maybe it poses a threat to someone’s physical well-being; maybe advertisers don’t want their brands next to it; maybe it gets the goat of the guy in charge. There are fair and credible ways to deal with this reality. Then there is what Mr. Musk did.
The billionaire capped off weeks of erratic rulemaking and rule-revoking by suspending the accounts of several U.S. journalists, including from The Post, last week. He said that they had posted “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family — a claim The Post found no evidence to support. It seems he was upset that an account had been tweeting public data about his private jet, so he conjured up a policy to justify banning it and used that same policy to justify banning reporters who criticized the move. Eventually, he allowed many to return.
Next Mr. Musk exiled those who repeatedly encouraged users to join competitor services; “free promotion,” suddenly, was against the rules, too.
Twitter is both a private company and a public square. Any owner has the legal prerogative to govern by whim. But owners also bear an ethical responsibility to strike a tricky balance, protecting speech and safety at the same time. Mr. Musk has made a mockery of the enterprise, caring about speech only when it’s his own speech and safety only when it’s his own safety.
This is not only an ethical failure but also a business disaster. Advertisers have fled Twitter. Journalists are some of Twitter’s most important users, and now they ask themselves whether they should leave the social media platform because they can’t report honestly on one of the richest men in the world without risking banishment.
In rebuilding Twitter — or, indeed, improving trust in any number of social media sites — it is unfair to expect that these companies will establish perfect and unchanging rules governing what users can say and how they can say it. Conservatives might want more speech allowed; progressives less. They can disagree in good faith on the limits. No terms of service policy will be comprehensive enough to cover every possible situation in the impossibly vast realm of human interaction. Twitter’s decision to ban then-President Donald Trump from its platform in the pre-Musk era was an exception to its “public interest” policy in which world leaders were afforded more leeway to break rules than everyday users — based not only on the content of his tweets but also on the context of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The important thing is that social media companies try to craft and enforce their rules fairly — and keep trying. These sites are going to get it wrong sometimes, given they’re administrating millions or billions of users saying millions or billions of nonsensical things every day. What matters is that they’re set up to get it right, in aggregate, according to the public commitments they’ve made.
That starts with something as simple as platforms committing to transparency, so that, for example, platforms’ conversations with government agencies and campaigns occur through proper channels and that responses to requests are consistent with existing standards.
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End of carousel- Lawyers plead guilty in racketeering case in Fulton County, Ga.
- The Biden administration announces more than $100 million to improve maternal health.
- Wisconsin Republicans back off impeachment threat against justice.
- Bahrain’s hunger strike ends, for now, after concessions to prisoners.
- A Saudi court sentences a retired teacher to death based on tweets.
Attorneys for Donald Trump have pleaded guilty in the racketeering case led by Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani T. Willis. Even those lawyers related to the deals focused on equipment-tampering in rural Coffee County are relevant to the former president — they help to establish the “criminal enterprise” of which prosecutors hope to prove Mr. Trump was the head. The news is a sign that the courts might be the place where 2020 election lies finally crash upon the rocks of reality. The Editorial Board wrote about the wide range of the indictment in August.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced more than $103 million in funding to address the maternal health crisis. The money will boost access to mental health services, help states train more maternal health providers and bolster nurse midwifery programs. These initiatives are an encouraging step toward tackling major gaps in maternal health and well-being. In August, the Editorial Board wrote about how the United States can address its maternal mortality crisis.
Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) announced Tuesday that Republicans would allow the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau to draw legislative maps, a dramatic reversal after years of opposing such an approach to redistricting. A new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court is expected to throw out the current maps, which make Wisconsin the most gerrymandered state in America. Mr. Vos has been threatening to impeach Justice Janet Protasiewicz, whose election this spring flipped control of the court, in a bid to keep those maps. This led to understandable outcry. Now it seems Mr. Vos is backing off his impeachment threat and his efforts to keep the state gerrymandered. Read our editorial on the Protasiewicz election here.
Prisoners are eating again in Bahrain after the government agreed to let them spend more hours outside and expanded their access to visitors, a welcome development ahead of the crown prince’s visit to Washington this week. Activists say the monthlong hunger strike will resume on Sept. 30 if these promises aren’t kept. Read our editorial calling for the compassionate release of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a political prisoner since 2011 who participated in the strike.
A retired teacher in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, has been sentenced to death by the country’s Specialized Criminal Court solely based on his tweets, retweets and YouTube activity, according to Human Rights Watch. The court’s verdict, July 10, was based on two accounts on X, formerly Twitter, which had only a handful of followers. The posts criticized the royal family. The sentence is the latest example of dictatorships imposing harsh sentences on people who use social media for free expression, highlighted in our February editorial.
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These companies can hardly be blamed for not having had ironclad policies in place to address a U.S. president inciting armed insurrection; it was the first — and, hopefully, the last — time. But they can be blamed for lacking procedures for how to handle situations that their rules don’t easily accommodate. It should be clear which teams are involved at which point in the conversation and where they are supposed to look for guidance — whether that’s similar policies or company’s stated values.
Content moderation has evolved beyond a takedown, leave-up binary to include interventions such as labels that add context to posts, prompts that urge users to reconsider posts and algorithms that reduce the spread of posts. Platforms should explain when they’re employing these tactics — at what scale, for what types of content and, most important, to what end. That means two things: That companies should study and publish the impact of their content moderation decisions, and that they should be able to connect that impact to their stated aims.
Without strictures that recognize the push-and-pull reality of expression on the internet, and a credible process to apply the rules, there will be nothing to guide these platforms if they’re trying to do the right thing — and nothing to constrain them if they’re not.
