from the lying-and-hypocrisy dept
If you’ve been reading Techdirt over the past few months, literally nothing in this latest Cody Johnston video will be surprising or new, but it does do a really nice job of laying it all out in a pretty clear way in just 52 minutes of humorous exposition:
It sounds like Part II will be looking at the Twitter Files, which we’ve also debunked multiple times here, so I look forward to that as well.
The key point that Cody makes in the video, which we keep trying to highlight here, is that the issue is not that Musk isn’t free to run Twitter however he wants. He is. He can. The issue is that in speed running the content moderation learning curve not only is he going back on basically everything he said (hilariously to loud applause from his biggest cultish fans), but he’s only doing so when the “bad stuff” seems to impact him personally.
While the company used to have a trust & safety staff that focused on making the site “safe” for as many people as possible, almost all of the decisions we’ve seen to date under Musk are simply about making the site a safe space, personally, for Elon Musk. That is, people who are advocating violence or doxxing people Musk doesn’t know? Those seem free to continue, and are encouraged to drum up as much engagement as possible. But if Musk himself feels personally inconvenienced then, magically, he must do something.
The hypocrisy in these decisions is one thing. The fact that Musk seems to view the moderation decisions solely through the lens of what makes him feel better, personally, is what’s really telling. For years, we’ve highlighted that most critics of trust & safety efforts basically think the “right way” to do trust & safety is what they think is best for themselves. Musk is in the rare position where he can actually let that play out.
The reality for most other sites, though, is that they’re forced to face actual trade-offs about how to make the site more broadly trustworthy and safe. Musk doesn’t seem to realize that’s part of what’s necessary to make a site long-term sustainable. So, Twitter becomes his personal playground, but not one that the rest of us should want to play in.
Filed Under: cody johnston, content moderation, elon musk, hypocrisy, safe space, trust & safety
Companies: twitter
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