Elon Musk will it transform Twitter? By becoming the property of the manager of Tesla and SpaceX, the social network passes in the hands of a self -proclaimed “absolutist of freedom of expression”. “Twitter has become an agora, a village place”, pleaded, Monday, April 25, in a press release, the entrepreneur for Who people must be able to “express themselves freely, within the limits of the law”. However, M. Musk has in mind the very extensive American conception of freedom of expression, since The first amendment to the United States Constitution enjoins the Congress not to vote on law which restricts the “Freedom of Speech”. Some therefore hope for a great upheaval in Twitter. Among them, the Republicans and supporters of ex-president Donald Trump. The latter have long been accusing social networks like Twitter of “censor” the conservatives.
However, for Elon Musk, changing Twitter radically will be difficult. The libertarian is not the first web service manager to brandish the standard of the “Freedom of Speech”. This was the case for most personalities in the “old internet culture, basically the web 1.0 (late 1990s) and start of the web 2.0, pre-2005”, recalled on Twitter Yishan Wong, former CEO of the powerful and libertarian Reddit discussion forums, who first welcomed neonazis or photos of naked teenagers. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the Facebook parent company, Instagram and Whatsapp, himself argued, in 2018, that The words of the Holocaust denialists should not be depolved and that social networks should not land in “arbitrators of the truth”.
But, warns Yishan, if the principle of freedom of expression remains good, “practical issues have changed, because the world has changed”. Passed from the margins to a central role, social networks were used to harass, rip or spam, and accused of having favored ethnic violence in Burma, India or Ethiopia, disseminated from jihadist propaganda, allowed attempts to handle elections by Russia, helped to prepare the assault of the American Capitol on January 6, 2021, etc. All social networks – Reddit, Facebook and Twitter included – have gradually implemented content moderation of content and combating increasingly elaborate abuses. These are not “supporting”, says Yishan, for whom Mr. Musk risks, with Twitter, to “live a hell”.
the warning of Thierry Breton
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