2022.04.25 经营Twitter要让埃隆-马斯克失望了

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IDEAS
Running Twitter Is Going to Disappoint Elon Musk
Social media’s newest billionaire overlord is in for a surprise.

By Evelyn Douek
Elon Musk
Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post / Getty
APRIL 25, 2022, 3:50 PM ET
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About the author: Evelyn Douek, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School, is a senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

A fun thing about content moderation—the practice of social-media platforms deciding what we can and cannot say in some of the world’s most important online spaces—is that almost everyone thinks that it’s broken, albeit in different ways. Almost everyone also thinks that if you just put them in charge, they would fix things. When you’re the world’s richest man, you can actually give it a shot. And so, Elon Musk is buying Twitter, and a main reason is that he doesn’t like the company’s content moderation.

A peculiar fact about our modern public sphere is how much its borders depend on the whims of a few companies and their billionaire owners. A handful of people—mostly men and mostly in Silicon Valley—decide whether Russian state media should be allowed to have social-media accounts, whether a controversial post about the coronavirus can be amplified to millions of people or will be taken down, and whether the former president of the United States will keep or lose his most direct line to the global public. The executives who kicked Donald Trump off Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube early last year could’ve made those judgments by coin toss and no one could have done anything about it. The deliberation about whether to let him back on if he runs for president again in 2024 could be just as arbitrary. Millions of similar decisions—of differing levels of consequence—are made every day.

Read: Will Elon Musk go full future-of-civilization on Twitter?

Our public sphere is governed by almost entirely unconstrained private power. As the internet has become ever more centralized on just a few major platforms, the impact of those companies over every aspect of our lives—politics, culture, the very way we speak—has kept on growing.

That might not seem so bad when content-moderation decisions come out how you want them to. Many on the left celebrated platforms’ ability to banish Trump with a few clicks. Many on the right believe they are unfairly targeted by left-leaning Silicon Valley executives and may celebrate a more freewheeling Twitter if Musk gets rid of many of its content-moderation rules. But that’s shortsighted. Ultimately, private power will always protect private power and not public interests.

Beyond the stray hints he’s offered in tweets, SEC filings, and interviews, Musk hasn’t given much detail about his vision for Twitter. But if he thinks it can exist without extensive content moderation, he is in for a shock. A universal rule of user-generated platforms is that every one of them has to moderate posts once it reaches a certain size. A platform that refuses to dirty its hands by taking down content will soon become flooded with scammers, porn, terrorist recruiters, and, sometimes, literal shitposts. And its user base, its advertisers, and the other tech companies it relies on to operate won’t like that. Parler, Gettr, and Reddit all learned this lesson the hard way. That’s not even to mention the tightropes platforms have to walk in dealing with governments around the world that are ramping up pressure on platforms to submit to their will, often at the cost of their citizens’ free-speech rights.


Read: Of course Elon Musk wanted Twitter

Fine-grained and consistent content moderation is impossible on platforms that host hundreds of billions of posts a year. Optimists might argue that Musk is known for his ability to make seemingly improbable things happen: private space travel, mass-market electric vehicles. And some of Musk’s ideas for Twitter could open up new possibilities. He has said he wants to make the platform’s recommendation algorithm “open source” so that people can see what it is promoting or demoting. Many digital-rights activists and regulators have been calling for similar kinds of algorithmic transparency for a while. Platforms and policy makers should be thinking about new ways to empower users and the public in the governance of online spaces.

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But most of Musk’s vision does not actually appear to be that novel. Instead, it’s a return to the past. In its early years, Twitter staked out a position as more hands-off than its peers. It famously pronounced itself the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” But the past half decade of public criticism, and the pandemic especially, has prompted most major platforms to shift stance. Perhaps at times they overcorrected. But if Musk has a utopian vision of a libertarian internet, he should read about the history of content moderation. Many who thought an anything-goes internet governed by its users alone was a good idea came to regret their naivete.

So platforms must moderate, but Musk is right that the public deserves more insight into what’s going on. The public and regulators should demand more transparency so that they know what content is actually on platforms, how platforms are moderating it, and whether they are actually upholding their publicly stated rules. Internet companies routinely say that they enforce their rules evenhandedly and not because of business or political incentives. But they should be forced to structure themselves in ways that reflect those commitments. Specifically, their trust-and-safety teams shouldn’t be intermingled with their revenue-growth and lobbying teams. Platforms should be forced to disclose how outside parties—including fact-checkers, governments, and other platforms—influence their content-moderation decisions, and submit to independent audits of their systems to make sure they are doing what they say. Law can do more to force platforms to be more proactive and accountable. And regulators are slowly lumbering toward making this a reality. Just this week, for example, the European Union announced that it has reached a deal on a major package of platform regulation—although the final details are yet to be released.

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In the meantime, our online sphere remains at the mercy of plutocrats. No matter what Musk does with Twitter, we may soon find ourselves wistfully remembering the good old days when Twitter was run by a different eccentric billionaire, Jack Dorsey, who ate only seven meals a week and appeared to testify before Congress from his kitchen. But we can do better than such nostalgia. The best thing about this Musk comic-drama should be to illustrate why we need to demand more for our public sphere than just better billionaire overlords.

Evelyn Douek, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School, is a senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.



理念
经营Twitter要让埃隆-马斯克失望了
社交媒体的最新亿万富翁霸主将面临一个惊喜。

作者：Evelyn Douek
埃隆-马斯克
乔纳森-牛顿/《华盛顿邮报》/盖蒂
2022年4月25日，美国东部时间下午3:50
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关于作者。Evelyn Douek是哈佛大学法学院的博士生，是哥伦比亚大学骑士第一修正案研究所的高级研究员。

关于内容控制--社交媒体平台决定我们在一些世界上最重要的网络空间可以说什么和不能说什么的做法--的一个有趣之处在于，几乎每个人都认为它是坏的，尽管方式不同。几乎每个人都认为，如果你让他们负责，他们就会解决这些问题。当你是世界上最富有的人时，你实际上可以给它一个机会。于是，埃隆-马斯克要收购Twitter，一个主要原因是他不喜欢该公司的内容审核。

关于我们现代公共领域的一个奇特的事实是，它的边界在多大程度上取决于少数公司及其亿万富翁老板的奇思妙想。少数人--主要是男性，而且大多在硅谷--决定了是否应该允许俄罗斯国家媒体拥有社交媒体账户，关于冠状病毒的争议性帖子是否可以被放大到数百万人，或者会被删除，以及美国前总统是否会保留或失去他与全球公众的最直接联系。去年年初将唐纳德-特朗普踢出推特、脸书和YouTube的高管们可以通过抛硬币的方式做出这些判断，没有人能够对此采取任何行动。如果他在2024年再次竞选总统，关于是否让他重新上台的考虑可能同样是任意的。每天都有数以百万计的类似决定--不同程度的后果--被做出。

阅读。埃隆-马斯克会在推特上大谈未来文明吗？

我们的公共领域被几乎完全不受约束的私人权力所支配。随着互联网越来越集中在几个主要平台上，这些公司对我们生活的方方面面--政治、文化、我们说话的方式--的影响不断增加。

当内容管理决定按照你的意愿出现时，这可能看起来并不那么糟糕。许多左派人士为平台能够通过几次点击就驱逐特朗普而感到高兴。许多右派人士认为，他们被左倾的硅谷高管不公平地盯上了，如果马斯克摆脱了许多内容审核规则，他们可能会庆祝一个更加自由的Twitter。但这是短视的。归根结底，私人权力总是保护私人权力而不是公共利益。

除了在推特、美国证券交易委员会文件和采访中提供的零星暗示外，马斯克还没有就他对推特的愿景给出很多细节。但是，如果他认为没有广泛的内容控制就能存在，那他就会受到冲击。用户生成平台的一个普遍规则是，一旦达到一定规模，每个平台都必须对帖子进行审核。一个拒绝通过删除内容来弄脏自己的手的平台，很快就会充斥着骗子、色情、恐怖分子招募者，有时甚至是字面上的狗屎帖子。而它的用户群、广告商和它赖以生存的其他科技公司都不会喜欢这样。Parler、Gettr和Reddit都从这个教训中吸取了教训。这还不算，在与世界各地的政府打交道时，平台不得不走钢丝，这些政府正在加大对平台的压力，使其服从自己的意愿，而这往往是以公民的言论自由权为代价的。


阅读。埃隆-马斯克当然想要Twitter

在每年承载数千亿帖子的平台上，精细和一致的内容审核是不可能的。乐观的人可能会说，马斯克因其有能力使看似不可能的事情发生而闻名：私人太空旅行、大众化的电动汽车。而马斯克对Twitter的一些想法可能会带来新的可能性。他说，他希望将该平台的推荐算法变成 "开源"，这样人们就可以看到它在推广或贬低什么。许多数字权利活动家和监管机构已经呼吁类似的算法透明度有一段时间了。平台和政策制定者应该思考新的方法，在网络空间的治理中赋予用户和公众权力。

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但马斯克的大部分设想实际上并不显得那么新颖。相反，它是对过去的一种回归。在其早期，推特的定位是比其同行更加放手。它著名地宣称自己是 "自由言论党的自由言论翼"。但过去五年的公众批评，尤其是大流行，促使大多数主要平台转变立场。也许有时他们纠正过头了。但是，如果马斯克对自由主义的互联网有一个乌托邦式的愿景，他应该阅读一下内容控制的历史。许多人认为由用户单独管理的无所不包的互联网是一个好主意，但他们后来为自己的天真感到后悔。

因此，平台必须节制，但马斯克是对的，公众应该对正在发生的事情有更深入的了解。公众和监管机构应该要求更多的透明度，以便他们知道平台上到底有什么内容，平台是如何调节的，以及他们是否真的在维护他们公开声明的规则。互联网公司经常说，他们公平地执行其规则，而不是因为商业或政治动机。但他们应该被迫以反映这些承诺的方式构建自己。具体来说，他们的信任和安全团队不应该与他们的收入增长和游说团队混在一起。应该强迫平台披露外部各方--包括事实核查人员、政府和其他平台--如何影响他们的内容审核决定，并接受对其系统的独立审计，以确保他们言出必行。法律可以做得更多，迫使平台更加积极主动和负责任。监管机构正在缓慢地将这一目标变为现实。例如，就在本周，欧盟宣布它已经就一揽子重要的平台监管方案达成协议--尽管最终细节尚未公布。

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与此同时，我们的网络领域仍然受到财阀的摆布。无论马斯克对Twitter做了什么，我们可能很快就会发现自己在怀念过去的美好时光，那时Twitter是由另一位古怪的亿万富翁杰克-多尔西(Jack Dorsey)经营的，他每周只吃七顿饭，并在厨房里出现在国会面前作证词。但我们可以做得比这种怀旧更好。这部马斯克的滑稽剧最好的地方应该是说明为什么我们需要为我们的公共领域要求更多，而不仅仅是更好的亿万富翁霸主。

Evelyn Douek是哈佛大学法学院的博士生，是哥伦比亚大学骑士第一修正案研究所的高级研究员。