Those Dedicated to Limiting Harmful Posts Worry About Twitter Under Musk

“Do I think Elon Musk is going to be a vanguard about addressing the problems of disinformation and rising extremism? No, I just don’t,” he said, adding, “I think there’s a very strong case to be made that there’s going to be a dilution of whatever policies Twitter has had in place.”

Mr. Musk’s fortune and celebrity — he is also behind Tesla and SpaceX — will give him a powerful bully pulpit in the roiling debates over the limits of free speech, which he called “the bedrock of a functioning democracy” in a statement on Monday announcing the purchase.

He could also face financial and political constraints, like a new law by the European Union to require social media platforms to scrub their sites of misinformation and abuse. That could temper some of the “sky is falling” fears of his takeover.

At least one idea he has floated, making public the algorithms the company has designed, echoes those put forward by people in favor of reducing harmful content.

They include, most prominently, former President Barack Obama, who last week outlined a vision for combating disinformation at a conference at Stanford University that included subjecting algorithms to greater scrutiny and regulation.

“The real problem,” said Rachel Goodman, counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit, “is that the future of how we share and advance knowledge and debate the issues central to our democracy shouldn’t depend on whether a single person in control is a superhero or supervillain.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/technology/musk-misinformation-twitter.html