Liberal meltdown

Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase has the left and right switching sides

FOR the better part of a decade, conservatives have complained that tech giants use their power over platforms to suppress conservative views. Their complaints have not received much sympathy outside the movement. But perhaps they will now that Elon Musk is buying Twitter and the left is uneasy at the prospect of an owner hostile to its designs — specifically, an owner who is promising less aggressive moderation policies, possibly including restoring Donald Trump to the platform.

“This deal is dangerous for our democracy,” proclaimed Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean and New York Times columnist Charles Blow promised to delete their accounts if the acquisition goes through. And Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich complained: “Musk and his apologists say if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere. But where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach millions of people other than Twitter?”

All of these missives were, of course, posted on Twitter. And all of them sound … a lot like conservatives, up until about five minutes ago.

Back in the olden days, it was Republican senators complaining that Big Tech’s control over the discourse was a threat to American democracy. Meanwhile, the left earnestly explained that Twitter is a private company — aren’t conservatives supposed to love private property? — and has a perfect right to set whatever moderation policies it wants.

What a difference a deal makes! Suddenly, “private companies can do whatever they want” might not be quite sufficient to ensure a robust,

democratic debate about the vital issues of our times — and “go start your own social media platform if you don’t like it” seems a somewhat inadequate retort to those who complain.

That still leaves the argument that conservatives — and Musk — are simply wrong that social media moderators were systematically “deplatforming” conservative ideas, rather than struggling through the messy, complicated process of moderating any large-scale platform. Yishan Wong, former chief executive of Reddit, made this case shortly after Musk announced his plan to buy Twitter.

Wong suggests that the freewheeling policies of a decade past, when a Twitter exec proudly called the company “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” were fine for the old days of the internet, when networks were small. However, as the user base multiplied, so did harassment, libel, pornography, spam and other abusive behaviors, and platforms were forced to crack down, lest all their users flee.

The sheer scale of the networks made that unavoidably controversial. Many users meant many viewpoints, including disagreements over what, exactly, crosses the line. It also meant many moderators, each judging gray areas differently, so similar cases aren’t always resolved the same way. But such minor imperfections, this argument goes, aren’t a conspiracy against free speech, or conservatives, and if Musk tries to turn the clock back to an earlier era, he will quickly discover why all these policies were necessary.

All this sounds very reasonable, very persuasive … and yet.

Of course, Wong is right that some amount of moderation is necessary; if platforms didn’t control spam, doxxing, defamation, pornography and violent imagery, users would leave or sue. But it does not therefore follow that they must also crack down on vaccine skepticism, people who think that trans women aren’t really women, or media stories about Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings, to name just a few of the viewpoints Twitter has at some point deemed verboten.

Those latter policies weren’t necessary to keep the platform usable for everyone; they were a choice to make the platform more comfortable for certain users, and views. That this was the effect is obvious from the lopsided reaction to the prospect of less moderation. If things were really so evenhanded, the left would not be freaking out, while the right celebrates.

(If you are tempted to suggest that the right just breaks the rules more, well, that’s sort of the point; of course conservatives will end up breaking the rules more if left-wing moderators are writing them according to their own dogma — and making all the close calls in favor of the home team.)

Now, one might argue that rightwing viewpoints ought to be suppressed because they are hateful and retrograde and dangerous to democracy. That argument is pretty common. But one could also ask whether it isn’t a little dangerous when a social media platform takes it on itself to define and massage the discourse this way. Maybe even a little … undemocratic.

After all, our deepest political divides can’t be moderated away; they have to be argued through, no matter how unpleasant the prospect, or how much we’d prefer to listen only to our own side. And where can we hash out the hard problems, if not on Twitter, the digital water cooler where the global political class gathers?