Because Musk is not the solution to Twitter’s illiberal problem
For platforms like Twitter, the time has come to move from supposedly enlightened despotism to liberal democracy. The analysis by Stefano Feltri, director of Domani Quotidiano
The internal documentation published by the journalist Bari Weiss seems to indicate that CEO Jack Dorsey was fully convinced of this approach, that obscuring or neutralizing key figures in the conservative world was not only legitimate, but also necessary to protect the quality of information and democratic debate.
Yet, it turns out from the investigations of another journalist from the pool, Lee Fang, Twitter was much less scrupulous when it came to propaganda from the American government but on less ideologically connoted fronts: in 2017, for example, the Central Command of the armed (Centcom) informs Twitter to protect, ie keep on the "white list", a series of accounts that the US military to "amplify" certain messages in Arab countries.
So: the government knew that Twitter has black and white lists that no one knew anything about, and the platform supports the government's propaganda of reference while publicly claiming that there is no room for government interference on the social network.
The US military systematically uses Twitter to spread its narrative, i.e. propaganda, against Russia and China, while denouncing the often non-existent interference of Russia and China in the American debate. The platform knows it and is complicit.
News of this kind should alarm, and not only in the United States: in recent years Twitter has taken the place of news agencies, it is the first level of political communication, politicians use it to make their statements, journalists to disseminate scoop, activists for their campaigns.
You live well without it, but if a country prohibits the use of Twitter, especially if selectively only to some subjects, it immediately qualifies as a non-free country. Because in the era of social media, platforms are the spaces of democracy, but we have confirmation that even the theoretically freest one, i.e. Twitter, has been manipulated by its leaders to favor one political party and its ideas against the other.
The fact that Jack Dorsey and his managers thought they were on the side of the "good guys" against the bad guys, namely Donald Trump, Rudi Giuliani and Steve Bannon, is no extenuating factor.
The worst thing, perhaps, is that the liberal media do not cover this scandal because Elon Musk is not one of theirs. And because the inconvenient truth that emerges from the Twitter files is that the American democratic world has used illiberal and anti-democratic practices to oppose its opponents hidden behind the banners of democracy and liberalism.
IS THERE A LESSON FOR THE ITALIAN LEFT?
There is also a lesson for the Italian left in all of this: denying the scandals on one's side and minimizing the relevance of the substantial cultural and value homogeneity of the Italian elite does not help to stop the right. On the contrary, it deprives progressive battles of all legitimacy if they are fought with tools that are in contrast with the processed values.
Is Elon Musk the solution to the Twitter problem? Most likely not, because in these first few weeks as the new reference shareholder and CEO he has only replaced one discretion with another, the pro-Democratic arbitrariness of Jack Dorsey with his conservative anarchism. Silence or relaunch content based on your preferences, different from those of the previous management but no longer legitimate.
Musk was right in his declarations of principle, even if he didn't respect them: platforms shouldn't exercise any filters, and if this also means tolerating hate speech, pornography or illegal content, it's up to the judicial authority to enforce the law.
The difference between democratic regimes and all the others is not so much in the electoral moment as in the fact that the former are governed by law and the others by arbitrariness.
It is time for platforms to move from despotism that claims to be enlightened to liberal democracy.
(Excerpt from the analysis by director Stefano Feltri; here the complete analysis )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/musk-twitter-files-democrazia-2/ on Mon, 26 Dec 2022 06:22:16 +0000.