2022.04.27 埃隆-马斯克不购买Twitter以捍卫言论自由

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IDEAS
Elon Musk Isn't Buying Twitter to Defend Free Speech
Business moguls tend to be big on protecting speech, right until it hurts their bottom line.

By Adam Serwer
Elon Musk
DDP / Sipa / AP
APRIL 27, 2022, 5:05 PM ET
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About the author: Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Conservatives on Twitter have greeted Elon Musk as a liberator. The mega-billionaire is in the process of purchasing the social-media platform and reorienting it toward what he calls “free speech.” The conservative columnist Ben Shapiro celebrated the news of the new free-speech era by insisting that Musk engage in politically motivated mass firings of Twitter workers based on their perceived political leanings.

For those who are not terminally online, a little explanation is in order. Compared to the big social media giants, Twitter is a relatively small but influential social network because it is used by many people who are relatively important to political discourse. Although the moderation policies of a private company don’t implicate traditional questions of free speech—that is, state restriction of speech—Twitter’s policies have played a prominent role in arguments about “free speech” online, that is, how platforms decide what they want to host.


When people talk about free speech in this more colloquial context, what they mean is that certain entities may be so powerful that their coercive potential mimics or approaches that of the state. The problem is that when private actors are involved, there's no clear line between one person's free speech and another: A private platform can also decide not to host you if it wants, and that is also an exercise of speech. Right-wing demands for a political purge of Twitter employees indicate just how sincerely conservatives take this secondary understanding as a matter of principle rather than rhetoric.

The fight over Twitter’s future is not really about free speech, but the political agenda the platform may end up serving. As Americans are more and more reliant on a shrinking number of wealthy individuals and companies for services, conservatives believe having a sympathetic billionaire acquire Twitter means one less large or influential corporation the Republican Party needs to strongarm into serving its purposes. Whatever Musk ends up doing, this possibility is what the right is actually celebrating. “Free speech” is a disingenuous attempt to frame what is ultimately a political conflict over Twitter’s usage as a neutral question about civil liberties, but the outcome conservatives are hoping for is one in which conservative speech on the platform is favored and liberal speech disfavored.

Read: Elon Musk already showed us how he’ll run Twitter


Conservatives maintain they have been subject to “censorship” by social-media companies for years, either by the imposition of terms of service they complain are unfairly punitive to the right or by bans imposed on particular users. There is ample evidence though, that social-media networks consistently exempt conservative outlets from their own rules to avoid political backlash, a fear seldom displayed when it comes to throttling left-wing content. And despite the right-wing perception of liberal bias on Twitter, an internal audit found that the site’s algorithms “amplify right-leaning political content more than left-leaning content.” The evidence suggests that for all their outrage, conservatives consistently receive preferential treatment from social-media platforms, but are so cavalier about disregarding the terms of service that sometimes they get banned anyway.

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Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be surprising that many conservatives still complain that they are being censored even as these platforms’ algorithms continue to favor right-wing content. Indeed, the success of these complaints explains their persistence—if conservatives stopped complaining, the favorable treatment might cease. Musk is a sympathetic audience, even if that does not necessarily determine the direction Twitter will take under his ownership.

Liberal users on Twitter have greeted the news of Musk’s pending acquisition of the platform with everything from indifference to despair, while conservative reactions run the gamut from optimistic to worshipful, with some right-wing praise of Musk echoing the unending North Korean style flattery of the Trump years. For his part, Musk has said his priority is “freedom of speech,” a framing that some mainstream media outlets have credulously repeated.Musk’s subsequent tweets, stating that Twitter should ban only “illegal” content and that “If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect,” suggest that he has not thought all that much about the issue. The state broadly banning certain forms of expression is a much greater infringement on free speech than the moderation policies on a private platform, which anyone can choose not to use.

Every major right-wing Twitter alternative has imposed moderation policies while presenting itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter; most comically, posting disparaging comments about Trump originally violated the terms of service of Trump’s own app, Truth Social, which itself continues to ban “filthy” content, harassment, language that is “abusive or racist,” and “profanity.” The moderation of privately owned platforms is itself a form of protected speech; Musk’s ownership of Twitter simply means he will get to decide what those policies are.

And that’s precisely the point. Users on both the left and the right assume that during Musk’s tenure, Twitter’s policies will amplify conservative content and throttle left-leaning content. Both sides suspect that Twitter’s moderation policies regarding harassment will be altered to allow users to more frequently employ disparaging language about religious and ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. The extent of these changes depends on the balance between Musk’s financial concerns and his ideological ones. Right-wing alternatives to Twitter have failed to take off because conservatives want to make liberals miserable, not build a community in which there are no libs left to own. If conservatives successfully drive their targets off Twitter, or if the network becomes an unusable cesspool, it will become similarly worthless, both financially and politically. Social media platforms’ attempts to deal with harassment and disinformation have less to do with liberal political influence than making their platforms useful to advertisers.

Derek Thompson: Elon Musk buying Twitter is weird, chaotic, and a little bit awesome

The fact that conservative concerns about Big Tech vanish the second a sympathetic billionaire buys a social-media platform, however, illustrates the shallowness of their complaints about the power of Silicon Valley. Conservatives are not registering their concern over the consolidation of corporate power so much as they are trying to ensure that consolidation serves their interests. Put simply, conservatives hope that Twitter will now become a more willing vehicle for right-wing propaganda. Even if the platform tilts further in their direction, they will be motivated to continue to insist they are being censored—their criticisms likely exempting Musk himself in favor of attacking  Twitter’s white-collar workers, whom conservatives paradoxically perceive as the “elite” while praising their billionaire bosses as populist heroes. The insincerity of right-wing populism is represented by the fact that such “populists” find it preferable to be ruled by ideologically sympathetic barons than share a democracy with people who might put their pronouns in their email signatures.

In Republican-controlled Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis boasts of punishing Disney for its opposition to recent legislation forcing LGBTQ teachers to remain in the closet on the job. Last year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned of “serious consequences” if the party’s corporate benefactors continued to issue anodyne statements in opposition to GOP legislation aimed at disenfranchising Democratic constituencies. The Supreme Court decision opening the floodgates to unlimited corporate cash in American elections bears McConnell’s name, but apparently money qualifies as constitutionally protected speech only when that money can be relied upon to serve the Republican Party. As concerned as they might be about social-media moderation, conservatives are currently engaged, along with this kind of strong-arming, in the largest campaign of state censorship since the second Red Scare.

Conservative propagandists have represented their demand that corporate America advance the interests of the Republican Party as a populist “break” with Big Business, when it is simply an ultimatum: Serve us, or suffer. The current ideological vanguard of the conservative movement isn’t breaking with business, but with democracy, seeking to keep labor weak, the state captive, and corporate power and religious institutions subservient to its demands. Money is speech, as long as you fund our interests. You have the right to vote, as long as you vote Republican. You have freedom of speech, as long as you say what the party would like you to say.


Corporate consolidation has made the Republican Party’s turn to authoritarianism much easier. Liberals focusing on how Musk’s acquisition of Twitter might affect their experience on the platform should look at the bigger picture. Corporate America has filled the void in civil society left by the weakness of organized labor, leaving a tiny number of extremely wealthy people with outside influence. All the right-wing “populist” rhetoric in America is geared not toward weakening this influence but toward harnessing it.

Many media outlets have curiously described Musk as a “free-speech defender,” a term Musk enthusiasts have interpreted as a euphemism for someone with a high tolerance for bigotry against historically marginalized communities. But Musk has been perfectly willing to countenance the punishment of those engaging in speech he opposes. Tesla, for example, was disciplined by the National Labor Relations Board for firing a worker who was attempting to organize a union. Similarly, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but his commitment to free speech falters when it comes to unionizing the warehouse workers who are essential to his business.

Business moguls tend to be big on “freedom of speech” in this more colloquial sense, when it comes to the kind of speech that doesn’t hurt their bottom line. When it comes to organizing their workforces, however, a form of speech that could act as a check against their power and influence, that tolerance for free speech melts away. Workers fearful of how their wealthy bosses intend to use that power should take that reality into consideration.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



理念
埃隆-马斯克不购买Twitter以捍卫言论自由
商业大亨们往往很重视保护言论，直到它损害了他们的底线。

作者：Adam Serwer
埃隆-马斯克
DDP / Sipa / AP
2022年4月27日，美国东部时间下午5点05分
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关于作者。亚当-瑟韦尔是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。

推特上的保守派把埃隆-马斯克当作解放者来迎接。这位超级亿万富翁正在收购这个社交媒体平台，并将其重新定位为他所谓的 "自由言论"。保守派专栏作家本-夏皮罗(Ben Shapiro)为庆祝新的自由言论时代的到来，坚持要求马斯克根据他们被认为的政治倾向，对推特员工进行有政治动机的大规模解雇。

对于那些没有彻底上网的人来说，有必要做一点解释。与大型社交媒体巨头相比，推特是一个相对较小但有影响力的社交网络，因为它被许多对政治话语相对重要的人使用。尽管一家私营公司的审核政策并不涉及传统的言论自由问题--即国家对言论的限制--但推特的政策在有关网上 "言论自由 "的争论中发挥了突出的作用，即平台如何决定他们想承载的内容。


当人们在这种更通俗的语境中谈论言论自由时，他们的意思是，某些实体可能非常强大，以至于他们的强制潜力模仿或接近国家的强制性。问题是，当私人行为者参与其中时，一个人的言论自由和另一个人的言论自由之间没有明确的界限。一个私人平台如果愿意，也可以决定不接待你，这也是一种言论的行使。右翼分子要求对推特员工进行政治清洗，表明保守派把这种次要的理解作为一个原则问题而不是修辞问题是多么真诚。

关于推特未来的斗争其实并不是关于言论自由，而是关于该平台最终可能服务的政治议程。由于美国人越来越依赖数量越来越少的富人和公司提供服务，保守派认为，如果有一个富有同情心的亿万富翁收购了推特，就意味着共和党需要强行要求为其服务的大型或有影响力的公司少了一个。无论马斯克最终做了什么，这种可能性实际上是右派正在庆祝的事情。"言论自由 "是一种虚伪的尝试，它将最终关于推特使用的政治冲突归结为一个关于公民自由的中立问题，但保守派希望的结果是，该平台上的保守派言论受到青睐，而自由派言论则受到排斥。

阅读。埃隆-马斯克已经向我们展示了他将如何运营Twitter


保守派认为，他们多年来一直受到社交媒体公司的 "审查"，他们抱怨服务条款对右派有不公平的惩罚，或者对特定用户施加禁令。但有充分的证据表明，社交媒体网络一直在豁免保守派机构遵守自己的规则，以避免政治上的反弹，而在扼杀左翼内容时，很少表现出这种恐惧。尽管右翼认为推特上有自由主义偏见，但一项内部审计发现，该网站的算法 "对右倾政治内容的放大程度高于左倾内容"。证据表明，尽管他们很愤怒，但保守派始终得到社交媒体平台的优待，但他们对无视服务条款如此轻率，以至于有时他们还是会被禁止。

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尽管如此，许多保守派仍然抱怨他们被审查，即使这些平台的算法继续倾向于右翼内容，这也不应该令人惊讶。事实上，这些抱怨的成功解释了它们的持久性--如果保守派停止抱怨，这种有利的待遇可能会停止。马斯克是一个富有同情心的听众，即使这不一定能决定Twitter在他的所有权下的发展方向。

推特上的自由派用户对马斯克即将收购该平台的消息表现出从冷漠到绝望的态度，而保守派的反应则从乐观到崇拜，一些右翼对马斯克的赞美与特朗普时期无休止的朝鲜式奉承相呼应。就马斯克而言，他说他的首要任务是 "言论自由"，一些主流媒体信口开河。马斯克随后在推特上表示，推特只应禁止 "非法 "内容，"如果人们想减少言论自由，他们会要求政府通过这方面的法律"，这表明他对这个问题没有想那么多。国家广泛地禁止某些形式的表达，对言论自由的侵犯要比私人平台的审核政策大得多，因为任何人都可以选择不使用这个平台。

每一个主要的右翼推特替代方案都强加了节制政策，同时把自己说成是推特的 "言论自由 "替代方案；最滑稽的是，发布关于特朗普的贬低性评论最初违反了特朗普自己的应用程序Truth Social的服务条款，该应用程序本身继续禁止 "污秽 "内容、骚扰、"辱骂或种族主义 "的语言和 "脏话"。对私有平台的管理本身就是一种受保护的言论；马斯克对Twitter的所有权只是意味着他将决定这些政策是什么。

而这正是问题的关键。左派和右派的用户都认为，在马斯克的任期内，推特的政策会放大保守派的内容，扼杀左倾的内容。双方都怀疑，推特关于骚扰的审核政策将被改变，允许用户更频繁地使用针对宗教和少数民族、妇女和LGBTQ人群的贬低性语言。这些变化的程度取决于马斯克的财务考虑和他的意识形态考虑之间的平衡。推特的右翼替代方案未能起飞，因为保守派想让自由派感到痛苦，而不是建立一个没有自由派可以拥有的社区。如果保守派成功地将他们的目标赶出了推特，或者如果这个网络成为一个无法使用的粪坑，那么它也会变得同样毫无价值，无论是在财政上还是在政治上。社交媒体平台处理骚扰和虚假信息的尝试，与自由派的政治影响关系不大，而是让他们的平台对广告商有用。

德里克-汤普森 埃隆-马斯克收购推特很奇怪，很混乱，而且有一点厉害

然而，当一个富有同情心的亿万富翁买下一个社交媒体平台时，保守派对大科技的担忧就消失了，这说明他们对硅谷力量的抱怨很浅薄。保守派不是在表达他们对企业权力整合的担忧，而是在试图确保这种整合为他们的利益服务。简单地说，保守派希望推特现在会成为右翼宣传的一个更乐意的载体。即使该平台进一步向他们的方向倾斜，他们也会有动力继续坚持他们正在受到审查--他们的批评可能会豁免马斯克本人，而倾向于攻击推特的白领工人，保守派矛盾地认为他们是 "精英"，同时赞扬他们的亿万富翁老板是民粹主义英雄。右翼民粹主义的不真诚表现在，这些 "民粹主义者 "认为，与其与那些可能把自己的代名词放在电子邮件签名中的人分享民主，不如由意识形态上同情的男爵来统治。

在共和党控制的佛罗里达州，州长罗恩-德桑蒂斯(Ron DeSantis)吹嘘要惩罚迪士尼，因为它反对最近迫使LGBTQ教师在工作中保持出柜的立法。去年，参议院少数党领袖米奇-麦康奈尔(Mitch McConnell)警告说，如果该党的企业赞助者继续发表不温不火的声明，反对旨在剥夺民主选民权利的共和党立法，将产生 "严重后果"。最高法院的裁决为美国选举中无限的企业现金打开了闸门，但显然，只有当这些钱可以被用来为共和党服务时，钱才有资格成为宪法保护的言论。尽管他们可能关注社交媒体的节制，但保守派目前正在参与，连同这种强硬的手段，自第二次红色恐慌以来最大的国家审查运动。

保守派的宣传人员把他们要求美国企业促进共和党的利益说成是与大企业的民粹主义 "决裂"，其实这只是一个最后通牒：要么为我们服务，要么受苦。目前保守主义运动的意识形态先锋不是与企业决裂，而是与民主决裂，寻求保持劳工的弱势，国家的俘虏，以及企业权力和宗教机构对其要求的服从。只要你资助我们的利益，金钱就是言论。你有投票权，只要你投票给共和党人。你有言论自由，只要你说该党希望你说的话。


企业合并使共和党转向独裁主义变得更加容易。自由主义者关注马斯克收购推特会如何影响他们在该平台上的体验，应该从大局出发。美国企业填补了公民社会因有组织劳工的软弱而留下的空白，使极少数极端富有的人拥有外部影响力。美国所有的右翼 "民粹主义 "言论不是为了削弱这种影响力，而是为了利用它。

许多媒体奇怪地将马斯克描述为 "言论自由的捍卫者"，这个词被马斯克的爱好者解释为对历史上被边缘化的社区的偏执有高度容忍的人的委婉说法。但马斯克一直完全愿意支持对那些从事他反对的言论的人进行惩罚。例如，特斯拉因解雇一名试图组织工会的工人而受到国家劳工关系委员会的处罚。同样，亚马逊的杰夫-贝索斯(Jeff Bezos)拥有《华盛顿邮报》，但当涉及到让对其业务至关重要的仓库工人成立工会时，他对言论自由的承诺就会动摇。

在这种更口语化的意义上，当涉及到不损害其底线的那种言论时，商业大亨们往往对 "言论自由 "非常重视。然而，当涉及到组织他们的员工时，一种可以作为对他们的权力和影响力的制衡的言论形式，对言论自由的容忍就会消失。担心他们富有的老板打算如何使用这种权力的工人应该考虑到这个现实。

Adam Serwer是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。