Musk joked earlier this month that he hoped buying the social network wouldn't be too painful for him. The self-proclaimed free speech absolutist may be inviting a world of pain for himself if he sets the platform on a collision course with the growing mass of legislation being applied to social media services all around.
The U.S. lags behind Europe when it comes to digital rule-making. Musk may not have noticed that the bloc just agreed on the fine details of the Digital Services Act, which is intended to harmonize governance procedures to ensure the swift removal of illegal speech.
EU lawmakers were quick to point out the hard limits coming down after Musk's winning bid for Twitter.
The DSA will be able to rein in Musk's tendencies, because the Commission can fine 4% of worldwide turnover for non-compliance.
The reason why he bought it in the first place was because of the negative net profit margin. He has to find ways to make it more profitable so that the company doesn't lose money.
Musk is not as free to act on his impulses as he is because his $43 billion bid for Twitter is financed with loans, rather than just cashing in the equity of his company.
He is in debt. He needs to pay his debts and if he had used his equity to buy Twitter, he would have had more flexibility. Depending on the value ofTesla, he could take any loss up to a point. The company needs to make a profit because he has to pay interest on his debt. I think it's even more than before.
For every failure to comply, it is 6. It would be an expensive hobby and the billionaire would view any DSA fines as parking tickets.
Repeated failures by Musk to comply with the DSA could lead to the European Commission issuing daily fines or even ordering a regional block on the service.
The ability to temporarily block access to a service for four is included in the final text of the regulation.
Even if Musk's fortune extended to regularly shelling out for large fines, he may have a harder time taking a course of free speech.
Europe seals a deal on tighter rules for digital services
The full spectrum of the DSA isn't due to come into force until the start of 2024, but the rules for VLOPs have a shorter implementation period of six months.
It means that if Musk wants to push the needle on speech absolutism across the EU, he won't have it. In Germany, there are already laws in place for platforms, so if you want a de-Nazified version, you can.
The DSA puts a number of specific obligations on VLOPs that may not exactly be front of mind for Musk as he celebrates an expensive new addition to his company portfolio (albeit, still pending shareholder approval), including requiring platforms to carry out risk assessments related to the dissemination.
The public policy director at the digital rights agency AWO predicts that the version of Twitter that is elonised would not meet the requirements of the DSA. Would he change his mind about preserving the EU market? He didn't buy it as a business opportunity but to protect free speech in the U.S.
The U.K., which now sits outside the bloc, has its own legislation on the horizon. The threat of jail time for named executives deemed to be failing to comply with regulatory procedures is included in the Online Safety Bill that is currently before the country's parliament. The regulator won't be allowed to troll them; they're British.
Tech CEOs to face faster criminal liability under UK online safety law
Is Musk willing to go to jail over free speech? Would he ever visit the U.K. again, and let his local executives take the blame?
The U.K.'s draft legislation would allow the regulators to block non- compliant services in the market if Musk goes against local.
This is not a way to make money, Musk said earlier this month. I don't care about economics at all.
I think he doesn't know how complex free speech is or how big a fight it is. The professor of IT law at the University of East Anglia says that it is going to be interesting to watch.
A growing number of countries are setting their own local restrictions and ramping up operational risks for owners of speech fencing platforms.
There are a growing number of autocratic regimes that are taking steps to censor the internet and restrict access to social media, such as Russia, Turkey, India or Nigeria.
If a platform restricted its operations to the United States with its specific and peculiar First Amendment tradition, it could get away with free-speech absolutism. A growing number of governments around the world want to influence what people are and are not allowed to see online, and most platforms have a lot of their users outside the U.S. This is for the European Union. It goes for China. It goes for a number of other countries, according to a professor of political communication at the University of Oxford.
It's best to start with saying "I'm for free speech." If you have enough money, you can pay the fines that governments will impose on companies that refuse to do things in the name of free speech. In a growing number of cases, the next steps include going after individual company employees, forcing internet service providers to block a platform, or both.
While in the United States, a platform that conducts content moderation on the basis of simplistic slogans will mostly face the fact that free speech is more complicated and ambiguous in practice than it is in theory, and that both users and advertisers clearly see that.
Independent judiciary and independent regulators, not individual proprietors or private companies, will want to decide what should and should not be free speech.
Nothing Musk has said or done suggests that he has a different understanding of free speech than the U.S. government. Even though Musk makes statements equating his ownership to the defense of human civilization, he can't change the laws around speech.
Musk has an overly simplistic understanding of free speech, which could doom users everywhere.
It feels like it was just a few years ago when Jack Dorsey, then the CEO and co-founder of the company, appeared to have a realization about the need for the company to factor in the health of its users. That led to a slow pace of progress by the company to tackle toxicity and improve tools for users to protect themselves from abuse. To ban on Donald Trump.
A free speech absolutist like Musk, who is expert at using social media to bully his own targets, threatens to burn all that hard won work right back down to ground zero.
If he actually wants the world to want to hang out in his town square, that would be the opposite of a smart strategy.
Musk might try to turn his bullyy on international regulators. He has clashed with the U.S. oversight bodies and has trolled the SEC on his social media accounts. In reference to an investigation it had instigated when he said he wanted to take the company private, it was recently referred to as " those bastards".
The SEC's perceived regulation of Musk's own speech and his open contempt for a public body that polices long-standing rules in areas like insider trading are both examples of Musk's rage. He may soon be clashing with someone on social media.
He doesn't really know they exist yet, so it's likely that he's not taking pot shots at them yet. EU commissioners are already sending Musk messages about how to adapt to their rules.
Be it cars or social media, any company operating in Europe needs to comply with our rules – regardless of their shareholding.
Mr Musk knows this well.
He is familiar with European rules on automotive, and will quickly adapt to the Digital Services Act.#DSA
— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) April 26, 2022
The EU's executive body will be responsible for deciding whether larger platforms are in violation of the bloc once the DSA is in force.
The Commission declined to comment on the ownership change or Musk's free speech rights.
Musk hasn't put a lot of meat on the bones of what he plans to do with the company.
The freedom of expression has been the focus of what he has said so far.
The first two words of his victory message are free speech.
He said that he wants to open source Twitter's algorithms to increase trust.
Before the sale deal was sealed, Musk responded to the question of why he wanted to buy the company by saying that it was important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech.
He dubbed the platform a town square.
It's important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law. If they are emphasized or deemphasized, action should be made apparent so that anyone can see that action has been taken. There is no behind the scenes manipulation.
It is important to the function of democracy, it is important to the function of the United States as a free country, and it is important to help freedom in the world.
Musk's definition of freedom of speech is fuzzy. The questioner in the interview asked a version of what free speech would mean for moderation on the micro-blogging site.
There are some limitations on free speech in the U.S., and of course that would have to be abided by, Musk replied.
He also said that there was an obligation to do that, before circling back to what appears to be his particular beef.
He may find fellow feeling with regulators and lawmakers in Europe, given that the DSA requires VLOPs to provide users with clear, accessible and easily comprehensible information.
The legislation requires that users be given some control over how they see and use the ranking and sifting artificial intelligences.
Musk has sketched a vision of putting Twitter's artificial intelligence on the web for nerds to tinker with.
It's not clear who's making what changes to where, having a blackbox algorithm promote some things and not others, and having a mysterious promotion and demotion for a few days. I think this can be quite dangerous, and I might pay more attention to how the platform does or does not create freedom.
There are some striking similarities between Musk's stated concerns and the focus of EU lawmakers in the DSA.
He said he would probably want to set guidance that would prefer to keep speech up than take it down when expression falls in a gray area between legal and illegal speech. It could put him back on a collision course with European regulators.
He suggested that dialing back amplification could be an appropriate measure in gray area situations where there is a lot of controversy.
I think we should allow the speech to exist if it's in doubt. If it's a gray area, I would suggest that you don't promote it in a case where there's a lot of controversy. Time outs are better than permanent bans.
It won't be perfect but I think we want to have the perception and reality that speech is a free as reasonably possible. We have free speech if that is the case.
On the content side, the EU's incoming regulation mainly concerns itself with harmonizing procedures for tackling explicitly illegal speech, but it avoids setting prescriptive obligations for fuzzier speech.
Instead, the bloc has decided to rely on other mechanisms for tackling harms like disinformation, such as a beefed up but still non-legally binding code of practice.
The DSA may not be able to do much about it if Musk decides to let a wave of misinformation rip across Europe.
Geese agrees that this is a more complicated area for EU regulation to tackle. She notes that the risk assessments, audits, and access to platform data would still have to be done by VLOPs, and that they would have to be subject to independent scrutiny and audits.
She thinks that if it goes bananas, the European people would leave. The risk is real.
Tang wonders if Musk's defence of free speech includes the dissemination of misinformation. I think he has been vague about it, but not very clear, on the dissemination side.
If Musk goes ahead with his idea of open source, it could be helpful to show that the platform is built to get disagreement, like other platforms.
It looks positive in theory, but the main priority for Musk is to kill off the fake accounts on the micro-messaging service. If he means that he will impose a real names policy and/or require identity verification to have an account, it would be a huge blow to the platform for free expression.
Does he mean real names and verified information, or does he mean using artificial intelligence to detect bot-like behavior? If he means real names, he will be a huge problem for the site. He suggests that using artificial intelligence to detect bots could be a good thing.
The suspicion has been that the micro-messaging service never really wanted to kill off thebots. The user numbers and shareholder value would be destroyed if it were to identify and purge all those fake accounts. If Musk takes the company private and doesn't care about economics, he may be in a position to hit the kill switch.
The EU has been trying to get platforms to agree to identify bots as part of a strategy to tackle misinformation.
The topic was talked about by Dorsey. It would be funny if it took Musk buying a bunch of stuff to get that done.
Is there an edit button? Every person thinks that is a terrible idea. If he succeeds in owning the social networking site, it will be coming.
Musk was asked about the risk of an edit button creating a new vector for misinformation and he sounded thoughtful and measured. I am open to ideas.
Maybe Musk was joking about being anabsolutist all along.
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