Musk’s Twitter can be good for all

As Twitter users everywhere brace for changes to their beloved platform under new ownership, no group is more anxious about Elon Musk’s intentions than the large and highly influential community of democracy activists and human-rights advocates. And arguably, no other group has more at stake.
Certainly, none has a closer appreciation of the platform’s potential — for both good and evil. This is the cohort that provided the world with its first demonstration of the power of Twitter by using it, along with Facebook and YouTube, to organise a revolution.
This same cohort has also borne the brunt of the counterrevolution, in which the old establishment has reasserted its power by weaponisng the same platforms against critics. Across the region, regimes routinely unleash troll armies to harass, abuse and discredit activists — women, especially — and deploy intelligence agencies to surveil their social-media activities.
In recent years, the community has worked hard to persuade platforms like Twitter and Facebook to institute policies and mechanisms to protect users from harassment and keep their personal data safe from snooping by hostile governments.
They have had some success: Platforms now devote resources, albeit inadequate, to crack down on bullying. Twitter introduced a special program, dubbed Project Guardian, to shield accounts most vulnerable to trolling.
So it isn’t hard to imagine the dismay caused by some of Musk’s pronouncements over the past couple of weeks. His suggestion that “all real humans” on Twitter be authenticated would endanger users who rely on anonymity for protection from prosecution, or worse, by malicious regimes. And his advocacy, in the name of free speech, against Twitter’s content-moderation policies is alarming to those who are frequently targets of hate speech.
Musk has since acknowledged that anonymity is important “for many.” But he has clouded rather than clarified matters by tweeting: “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law.” As activists know all too well, authoritarian regimes have long since introduced laws that criminalise what liberal states regard as free speech. In the most charitable view, Musk is merely ignorant of international realities.
To his admirers, Musk is guilty of nothing more than naivete in his self-identification as a “free speech
absolutist.” But activists point out that his record on this score is hardly, well, absolute.

—Bloomberg