Diary of a DMS Guy

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This week, I've been following Elon Musk, and his proposals to buy Twitter.

He seems to be motivated by the desire to maintain free-speech on the platform.

I find this quite ironic. In reality, we don't have free speech. It is illegal to defame character online, incite hatred or violence, be racist etc.

The underlying question is whether social media companies are required to police this. They could claim that they are a bit like the telephone companies - who provide the ability for people to connect but cannot be held responsible for what people say using those connections.

Clearly, in most people's opinion the social media companies do have the requirement to provide some policing of what and who can post on the platform.

The problem this gives is in interpretation of the rules. Who can say what and when on the platform.

So, for example, the ban of Donald Trump on many social media platforms...

Is this justified? Could it be interpreted that this is open to political manipulation ? 

So, Elon will be dragged into this should he buy Twitter.  I doubt that he will be able to allow twitter to become a complete Wild West when it comes to freedom of speech, so there need to be some policies of what is and isn't allowed. This then means that as the 100% owner of the platform, he becomes the ultimate decision maker and therefore in trying to deliver free-speech he actually will be making himself the official Censor on the platform!

There is a parallel discussion point, of which I've written about before.

That is the way that social platforms can manipulate people's opinions. This is nothing new in itself. Traditionally, we would choose which newspapers to read and would therefore be subject to the opinions of the owners of those papers. To the point that we would historically classify people by the papers they read - "The Sun Reader" for example.

Social Media is just so much more powerful in doing this. When we login to Facebook or Twitter, we don't see a completely randomised selection of stories and posts. They are selected using the "algorithm". The Algorithm generally presents posts to us that it thinks we want to see.

This promotes the "Echo Chamber Effect" where our views are reinforced by the platform, as we generally engage with posts that are in line with our thinking and associate ourselves online with people with similar viewpoints.

As someone who spends some of my time learning how to take advantage of the algorithms on social media to get my posts in front of people, I can see how people can be easily manipulated on social media. On social media, we can easily be convinced that false is true, or to believe an opinion that we otherwise wouldn't.

This is a massive problem potentially. We have already seen on several occasions that political elections can easily be manipulated by social media. It can be argued that Donald Trump won the White House through very strategic and clever use (abuse?) of Social Media. The UK Brexit Campaign was also won in this way.

So, going back to the concept of free speech in social media. Whether, it's free or not doesn't mean that we are "Free" to read what we want. We tend to read what is presented to us... and the platforms choose that.

So, It's not really Free. Is it ?