Elon Musk said that he is acquiring Twitter to enable ‘healthy’ debate on a wide range of ideas and counter a trend in which social media splinters into partisan ‘echo chambers.’ AFP
The first thing Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk did last week was fire two Indian-Americans who had bent over backwards to appease the platform’s powerful Left ecosystem.
Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal damaged Twitter’s credibility by endorsing the platform’s policy of selectively shadow banning, culling and capping accounts that called out Twitter’s bias.
Some of Musk’s proposed changes like charging a monthly fee ($19.99) for buying “blue tick” (at the time of publication, Musk confirmed it would cost $8) verification status are outlandish. Musk should instead double-down on his initiative to quickly set up a content moderation council. The aim: abolish bias, cut abuse and frame fair rules.
A social media aggregator is like a highway. Traffic flows through it. On a social media platform that traffic comprises user-generated content. The role of the platform, like a highway, is to provide the same access to all traffic that passes through except when it violates well laid-out rules.
The moment a social media aggregator like Twitter starts acting as an editor, it stops being an aggregator. It becomes a publisher. Editors and publishers block content they don’t like (even though the content may break no rules) and allow content they like (even when the content brazenly breaks rules).
That is the difference between publishers and social media aggregators. One provides neutrality. The other provides opinion.
Under former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, Twitter became a quasi-editorial platform. Dorsey was the progenitor of Twitter’s descent into ideological bias — a death knell for an aggregator platform.
If a national highway blocks certain vehicles because it doesn’t like their colour, make or driver, it’s no longer a national highway. It’s private property. That was Twitter’s schizophrenia. It pretended to be a neutral platform. It acted as a censorious editor.
After Dorsey left Twitter in 2021, knowing that he’d deliberately injected it with bias, the platform hired exactly the right person to keep it on Dorsey’s path: Parag Agrawal.
Indian-Americans are used to appeasing their bosses. Agrawal slipped effortlessly into his role. He had plenty of backing among Twitter’s 7,500 employees. None was more important than another Indian-American, legal head Vijaya Gadde.
Twitter is notorious for shadow banning handles whose opinions it doesn’t like. Left-Islamist handles, for example, get free rein. Their inflammatory posts, which often incite violence, are allowed to stay online. Handles which oppose such posts are shadow banned, culled, capped or — in certain cases — expelled from the platform.
What is shadow banning? It involves Twitter deliberately restricting tweets from reaching followers of the shadow-banned handle. It downgrades the handle’s tweets so that they don’t appear on most timelines. Such tweets lose visibility. Shadow banning is an underhand tactic and must be outlawed by the new Twitter management.
All tweets, as long as they are not inflammatory or incite violence, must receive equal treatment. Ideological bias — Left or Right — has no place on a social media platform.
What about culling and capping? These are equally nefarious tactics that Twitter began under Dorsey and continued under Agrawal. Again bias determines which handles lose followers (culling) and which stop receiving new followers (capping).
Musk was right to allege that the ratio of bots (fake accounts) on Twitter is far greater than the five per cent the old management claimed. The figure has been estimated by experts at 20-30 per cent. These fake accounts must be excised. The follower counts of many celebrities could fall by half if bots are banished.
Musk is not everyone’s favourite. He is regarded as a right-leaning maverick. Among Twitter staff, he is reviled. Many employees will leave. Many more will be sacked. But the purge will not happen overnight.
Twitter will lose its ideologues bit by bit, like water draining slowly out of a sink that Musk symbolically brought with him to Twitter headquarters the day he took charge.
In Twitter India, not much will change. Under Agrawal-Gadde, the Indian unit went to court to challenge the government’s policy on being the final arbiter of banning user content. The government’s new telecom rules, notified on 28 October 2022, reiterate in even stronger terms the obligation of social media platforms to redress user grievances within a specific time window. Failure to do so will trigger government oversight on unresolved user grievances.
Is this censorship? It is not. If a social media platform does its job of providing fair and equal access to all users and offloads content as per law, the government will have no role to play.
The government’s new rules are designed to ensure fair and equal treatment to all users in an ideologically-agnostic environment bereft of platform bias.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology notified on 28 October 2022 the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2022. A key objective of the new rules is to set up grievance appellate panels. The appellate panels will have a chairperson and two members.
According to the ministry’s notification, “The central government shall establish one or more Grievance Appellate Committees within three months from the date of commencement of the rules.” An official added: “The committee will decide complaints against intermediaries, including Twitter or Facebook, for displaying obscene, pornographic content besides content that threatens the unity and integrity of India.”
Twitter is akin to a digital public square. All shades of opinion can be aired so long as they follow basic rules of civility. Robust exchanges are fine. Abuse is not.
Musk may soon lose interest in Twitter as his attention wanders back to Tesla and SpaceX. But by vacuum cleaning Twitter, he would have made debate on social media more democratic than it was on the old Twitter.
The writer is editor, author and publisher. Views expressed here are personal.
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