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00:11 on the 14th of april 2022 the world's
00:15 richest man and oldest teenager elon
00:18 musk announced his intention to buy
00:20 twitter for 44 billion dollars at which
00:25 point i thought what a great opportunity
00:28 to make a video about the internet
00:30 freedom of speech and the ownership of
00:32 social media platforms
00:36 lot has happened first twitter's board
00:39 tried to fend off musk's takeover bid by
00:42 launching a so-called poison pill
00:44 defense which threatened to water down
00:46 musk's stake in the company if he bought
00:48 any more stock without their approval
00:51 then the board relented and agreed to
00:53 sell anyway soon after which musk
00:55 announced that he was putting the deal
00:58 on hold due to supposed revelations
01:00 about the number of fake accounts and
01:02 bots on the platform a few weeks later
01:05 musk took part in an all hands meeting
01:07 at twitter in which his interest in
01:09 buying the company genuinely seemed to
01:12 have returned and then finally just
01:15 literal minutes before i was initially
01:17 about to set up the kit to begin filming
01:19 this video musk announced that he was
01:21 looking to terminate the deal entirely
01:24 oh and all of this at the same time as
01:26 musk has been completing a right-wing
01:28 radicalization speed run has been
01:31 credibly accused of sexual assault by a
01:33 former spacex employee and was revealed
01:35 to have secretly fathered a set of twins
01:38 with a high-ranking executive at his
01:40 neuralink company it's been a lot to
01:43 keep up with at time of recording the
01:45 road ahead looks bumpy for both musk and
01:48 twitter with twitter stock having
01:50 plummeted to being worth considerably
01:52 less than musk is on the hook to pay for
01:54 the company it's no surprise that his
01:57 interest in doing so has waned
02:00 nevertheless twitter has pledged to sue
02:02 musk to force him to go through with the
02:04 deal and while musk has a pretty good
02:06 reputation for slipping away from the
02:08 consequences of his actions things do
02:11 seem likely to go in the company's favor
02:14 wherever things stand when the dust
02:16 settles the very prospect of musk
02:19 potentially owning twitter served to
02:22 reignite an ongoing and deeply visceral
02:25 debate about how the internet is and
02:28 should be governed to members of musk's
02:31 very very very dedicated fan base this
02:35 sequence of events has been akin to a
02:37 noble quest in which the visionary
02:40 spacex founder and dogecoin speculator
02:43 was fighting to free twitter from an
02:45 incompetent and or coddled leadership
02:48 for those less brought into the
02:50 billionaires irony soaked mythos the
02:53 idea of musk gobbling up twitter only
02:56 aggravated concerns over the power that
02:58 the increasingly consolidated and
03:01 centralized ownership of social media
03:04 gives billionaires and giant
03:06 corporations over our lives unlike
03:09 conversations about say physical
03:11 embodiment of divorce jeff bezos's 2013
03:15 purchase of the washington post debates
03:17 about what twitter's proposed change of
03:19 ownership might have meant for the
03:21 future of the platform weren't purely
03:23 speculative musk made it perfectly clear
03:26 that his decision to buy the company was
03:29 driven by a desire to change the service
03:32 in fact in an interview at the annual
03:34 ted conference in vancouver musk
03:36 suggested that he wasn't bothered by the
03:38 financials of the deal in the slightest
03:42 a way to sort of make money either
03:44 you've described yourself i don't care
03:46 about the economics at all some of the
03:48 changes that musk proposed were pretty
03:50 minor he has for example been a
03:53 consistent proponent of adding an edit
03:55 button which would allow users to amend
03:58 posts after the fact which seems like a
04:01 weird thing to get overly passionate
04:03 about until you remember that a
04:04 misjudged tweet about taking tesla
04:07 private in 2018 ended up costing musk 20
04:11 million dollars the issue that he had
04:13 placed at the heart of his proposed
04:15 acquisition of twitter however was
04:20 musk first signaled his discontent with
04:22 twitter's approach to protecting its
04:24 users freedom of speech in late march
04:28 when he posted a poll declaring that
04:30 freedom of speech is essential to a
04:33 functioning democracy and asking his
04:35 followers whether they believed twitter
04:38 rigorously adheres to this principle
04:40 seemingly encouraged by the 70.4 percent
04:43 of respondents who answered that no they
04:46 didn't feel that twitter was doing
04:47 enough to protect free speech mush then
04:50 signaled that he was giving serious
04:52 thought to founding a new social media
04:54 platform in which free speech is given
04:59 since revealing that he had actually
05:00 been buying up twitter stock that whole
05:02 time musk has remained consistent in
05:04 this explanation for his motivations his
05:08 letter to twitter's board offering to
05:09 buy the company the press release
05:11 announcing the board's initial
05:12 acceptance of that offer and countless
05:15 public statements throughout the will he
05:18 won't he acquisition saga all contained
05:21 references to transforming twitter into
05:24 a forum founded on an unyielding
05:27 commitment to freedom of speech of
05:29 course on the surface it's pretty hard
05:32 to disagree with musk's motives few
05:35 people outside of actual despots would
05:37 own up to disagreeing with freedom of
05:39 speech and expression on principle yet
05:43 exactly what freedom of speech means in
05:47 often seems much harder to pin down does
05:50 it just mean freedom from government
05:52 censorship or does it mean freedom from
05:55 any kind of suppression no matter who's
05:57 responsible does one's right to freedom
05:59 of speech end when one hits sends tweets
06:02 or should it also shield one from being
06:05 dogpiled for sharing a potentially
06:08 where most debates surrounding freedom
06:10 of speech and expression tends to skirt
06:14 around these complexities in today's
06:16 video we're going to embrace them we're
06:19 going to look at the ways in which the
06:21 more popular approaches to discussing
06:23 freedom of speech fail and we're going
06:25 to examine the origins of the notion
06:27 that freedom of speech even matters in
06:29 the first place by exploring the history
06:32 of what is often colloquially referred
06:34 to as the marketplace of ideas finally
06:38 we're going to consider what all of this
06:40 might mean for how we think about elon
06:43 musk's attempt to save free speech on
06:59 let's talk about law shall we
07:04 i think a useful place to start in
07:05 trying to understand how confused our
07:08 conversations surrounding free speech on
07:10 the internet have become is this short
07:13 video tweeted by british politician
07:15 nigel farage on the day after twitter's
07:18 board initially accepted elon musk's bid
07:21 to purchase the platform for context
07:24 farage is the ex-leader of the uk
07:26 independence party and campaigned for
07:28 decades for the uk to leave the european
07:31 union other than a brief mention of
07:34 cancel culture and a little bit of musk
07:36 worship however this video feels like it
07:39 could have come from anywhere along the
07:40 breadth of the political spectrum the
07:43 broad outline is that farage was over
07:46 the moon at the idea of musk buying
07:48 twitter because recently he'd been
07:51 noticing that he'd been getting a little
07:53 less engagement on the platform than he
07:56 once did i built up a twitter following
07:59 of 1.7 million people
08:02 and it wasn't very difficult
08:04 every single month to put on 30 40 50
08:06 000 new followers but within the last
08:08 few years that has completely stopped
08:11 i've had no growth on twitter whatsoever
08:13 the stuff i put out the stuff i say get
08:16 seen by far fewer people and look it's
08:19 easy to take the piss here anyone with
08:21 even the slightest bit of distance can
08:23 see that a few years ago farage was the
08:26 most prominent advocate for the winning
08:28 side of a nation-defining political
08:31 debate with brexit now having been
08:33 eclipsed by the pandemic russia's
08:36 invasion of ukraine and the early
08:37 warning signs of a recession it's no
08:40 surprise if less people are engaging
08:42 with his tweets yet farage quickly
08:45 converted this complaint about a slump
08:48 in follower growth into a vague
08:50 accusation of censorship
08:53 there's something called an algorithm
08:54 it's a weird mathematical formula i
08:57 don't fully understand how it works i
08:59 don't think the truth is many people do
09:01 but it's through their algorithms
09:03 where they're able effectively not to
09:05 ban you from twitter but to shadow ban
09:08 you from twitter which is interesting
09:11 because farrows hadn't been banned from
09:13 twitter at all and not a single tweet
09:16 had been deleted in fact he regularly
09:18 hits a thousand retweets and this video
09:21 in which he complains about being
09:22 censored appeared in my home feed
09:26 not even following him
09:28 of course a right-wing media personality
09:31 complaining about being silenced despite
09:33 having their own self-titled tv show is
09:36 nothing new and yes farage was probably
09:39 being willfully ignorant of other more
09:41 likely explanations for his decrease in
09:44 twitter engagement you know all of this
09:47 i bring this video up because this
09:49 tendency for all of our conversations
09:52 about the state of political debate
09:54 online to devolve so quickly into
09:56 accusations of censorship actually
09:59 reveals a much more fundamental problem
10:02 with how we talk about freedom of speech
10:05 see one by-product of america's
10:07 dominance of global culture is that most
10:10 english language debates surrounding
10:12 free speech revolves around an
10:14 understanding of what that phrase means
10:16 borrowed from the first amendment to the
10:22 not only because the first amendment
10:24 doesn't apply in toronto or melbourne or
10:29 wang but also because the first
10:36 the relevant part of that document
10:38 declares that congress shall make no law
10:40 abridging the freedom of speech or of
10:44 and the bit that most people pick up on
10:46 when their uncle jet starts ranting that
10:49 the banning of his favorite q a on
10:51 instagram account is a breach of the
10:53 first amendment is the word congress as
10:56 it currently stands the first amendment
10:59 does not apply to private companies only
11:02 to the government but even if it was the
11:04 case that social media platforms had to
11:07 abide by the same standards
11:09 the first amendment would still
11:12 kind of suck for the freedom of speech
11:15 granted to us citizens is what the
11:17 philosopher isaiah berlin calls a
11:20 negative freedom in those words congress
11:23 shall make no law all it actually
11:26 guarantees is that the government will
11:28 not do something it's simply freedom
11:31 from interference which seems
11:34 generally good but if we use this as the
11:37 basis for our broader definition of what
11:40 it means to have freedom of speech
11:42 we're left with the sentiment that
11:44 freedom of speech is when the government
11:46 doesn't do stuff and the less the
11:48 government does the more freedom of
11:52 in his statement surrounding his
11:53 potential purchase of twitter elon musk
11:56 had attempted to apply a similar logic
12:00 as he conceptualized it freedom of
12:02 speech sits at one end of a spectrum
12:05 with total censorship at the other and
12:08 the amount of moderation that twitterrun
12:10 takes deciding where the platform sits
12:12 on that spectrum in this view maximizing
12:16 free speech is easy you just do less
12:19 moderation in his ted interview musk was
12:22 pretty clear that his approach would
12:24 have been a highly cautious one if in
12:30 let it exist if it's a
12:34 a gray area i would say let let the
12:37 tweet exist and this understanding of
12:39 what it means to have freedom of speech
12:42 dominates our current debates on this
12:44 topic but beneath the rhetoric i think
12:47 most people actually have a much higher
12:49 standard for freedom of speech than this
12:52 as that clip from nigel farage suggests
12:54 most people don't want to just not be
12:57 actively censored whether that's by the
12:59 government or by some alleged woke mafia
13:02 at twitter most people want to not only
13:04 feel that they have the ability to
13:06 express their views to the world but
13:08 also that those views will have a decent
13:10 chance of being circulated to a
13:12 reasonable audience and that they will
13:14 be given a fair hearing when they are in
13:17 short as alan jarrod harridas argued in
13:19 a recent new york times column most
13:21 people want what isaiah berlin would
13:23 call a positive freedom of speech one
13:26 that doesn't just protect them from
13:28 censorship but also grants them some
13:30 guarantees surrounding the right to
13:33 speak and be heard itself the problem is
13:37 that actually defending the right to
13:39 speech quickly becomes more complex for
13:42 there are going to arise situations in
13:44 which protecting one person's right to
13:46 speak is necessarily going to involve
13:49 asking someone else to pipe down a bit
13:52 or you know ease off on the harassment
13:55 for a moment or two one therefore risks
13:57 a scenario in which creating space for
14:01 otherwise marginalized or silenced
14:03 voices is used as a pretext for more
14:06 sinister forms of censorship
14:08 outside of the us however human rights
14:11 law does generally recognize that there
14:13 are situations in which it is necessary
14:16 to make these kinds of decisions the
14:18 european convention on human rights
14:20 which forms the basis of human rights
14:22 law in 46 countries for instance
14:25 acknowledges that one speech may be
14:27 subject to such formalities conditions
14:30 restrictions or penalties as are
14:32 prescribed by law and are necessary in a
14:35 democratic society for the protection of
14:38 the reputation or rights of others where
14:41 the us first amendment takes this super
14:44 individualistic don't tread on me
14:46 approach to speech the european view is
14:49 generally that the rights which society
14:51 grants us come with corresponding
14:54 responsibilities to that society and i'm
14:57 sorry nigel but that occasionally
14:59 manifests as the responsibility to not
15:02 be the center of attention for just five
15:06 the context in which these laws were
15:08 written does a lot of explaining here
15:11 the u.s bill of rights from which the
15:13 first amendment was adapted was written
15:15 by a bunch of highly conspiratorial
15:18 dudes who having just thrown off the
15:20 absolute tyranny of king george iii were
15:23 mainly keen to ensure that their new
15:25 country could never again fall under the
15:28 control of a powerful individual with
15:30 desires to subjugate its people from
15:35 medium success on that one most european
15:38 human rights law by contrast has been
15:40 written since the end of the second
15:42 world war having witnessed firsthand how
15:44 fascists can use unregulated freedom of
15:47 speech to divide people supplant
15:50 democracy and commit atrocities the
15:52 authors of documents such as the
15:54 european convention on human rights
15:56 understood the need to proactively
15:58 defend democracy against those who would
16:01 turn it against itself
16:03 while it has its critics in truth this
16:06 european approach is far more honest
16:09 because limits to freedom of speech even
16:12 censorship exist in all societies
16:16 as julian york writes the united states
16:19 which has arguably the world's most
16:21 permissive laws around speech still
16:23 enacts limits one of which is on child
16:26 sexual exploitation imagery this is a
16:28 restriction put in place to protect
16:31 children that all but the most depraved
16:33 individual might agree with it is also
16:37 despite that consensus censorship it is
16:40 simply put censorship of which we
16:44 in addition to this most countries have
16:46 copyright laws which mean that outside
16:49 of some very specific circumstances i
16:52 can't end each and every one of my
16:55 videos by reciting let it go from frozen
16:58 as though it were a piece of medieval
17:00 poetry laws against libel and slander
17:03 mean that i can't tell you that mark
17:05 zuckerberg eats baby squirrels for
17:07 breakfast without opening myself up to a
17:09 lawsuit these are all limitations to
17:12 freedom of speech they're simply ones
17:15 which whether we personally agree with
17:17 them or not society at large has decided
17:20 are socially useful the so-called free
17:23 speech debate is often framed in
17:26 absolutist terms as a stark choice
17:29 between freedom and tyranny and this
17:32 abstracted approach is fine within the
17:34 context of your high school debate club
17:37 or throwaway twitter poll in the real
17:40 world however no even mildly complex
17:43 society has ever had complete
17:45 unrestricted freedom of speech
17:48 instead throughout history societies
17:50 have made choices about whose speech
17:53 should be valued and protected and who's
17:56 ignored suppressed or silenced in order
18:00 to facilitate a slightly more grown-up
18:02 discussion of the state of discourse and
18:04 debate on the internet then i want to
18:07 set aside this nebulous framing of more
18:10 free speech versus less and borrow
18:12 instead another lens through which elon
18:15 musk suggested that we might view
18:17 twitter as a digital town square or not
18:22 exactly rather than comparing and
18:24 contrasting twitter and the internet
18:27 more broadly with the specific space of
18:29 the town square i want to view it as an
18:32 aspect of what the german philosopher
18:33 jurgen habermas calls the public sphere
18:38 habermas defines the public sphere as a
18:40 realm of our social life in which
18:43 something approaching public opinion can
18:45 be formed you've likely heard it
18:47 discussed elsewhere however as the
18:49 marketplace of ideas
18:52 it is the metaphorical space in which we
18:55 pass out our differences about how
18:57 society should be organized the media is
19:00 a key part of the public sphere but the
19:02 media is not the entirety of the public
19:04 sphere we're participating in the public
19:07 sphere whenever we argue with a friend
19:09 about the trustworthiness of a
19:10 politician over a pint down the pub
19:13 whenever we go to a protest or decide to
19:15 buy or not buy a certain book newspaper
19:19 album or film by taking this approach we
19:22 can more maturely posit the question of
19:24 whether twitter as it currently exists
19:26 or might have done under elon musk can
19:29 be said to boast the attributes of
19:31 openness inclusivity and inquisitiveness
19:34 that we would surely like our public
19:38 but to give us some perspective on this
19:40 question i think it's useful to first
19:43 take a brief look at how the public
19:45 sphere operated in those mythical
19:48 centuries before the invention of the
19:52 but before we talk about that i want to
19:54 suggest that if you're enjoying this
19:56 video you're probably also going to want
19:58 to check out another video that i made
20:00 which questions elon musk's broader
20:02 futuristic vision for society and if you
20:06 want the best experience for watching
20:07 that video you're gonna want to do so on
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22:23 no no we're not doing that again this is
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22:28 well a lot other than like my my accent
22:31 obviously uh so now when i say that to
22:34 understand the role that twitter plays
22:36 in society in the early 2020s we first
22:39 need to take a look at a series of
22:40 events which took place in the late 17th
22:43 century your first response is probably
22:46 going to be oh great the video essay
22:48 genre has finally been driven beyond
22:50 parody shut it down boys and i get that
22:55 really i do but i think we often take
22:57 the existence of the public sphere this
23:00 ongoing collective discourse in which we
23:02 debate the social political and cultural
23:05 issues of the day for granted
23:08 see central to our understanding of this
23:10 so-called marketplace of ideas is the
23:14 feeling that the conversations we have
23:15 within it matter i'm gonna put this
23:18 thing down it's quite annoying the
23:21 reason we're driven to dunk on ben
23:22 shapiro when he posts a stupid or
23:25 misleading tweet is yes because it's
23:28 kind of fun but also because we think
23:30 that doing so will make an
23:31 infinitesimally tiny yet still 100 real
23:35 contribution to affecting social change
23:38 we know we're unlikely to change
23:40 shapiro's mind but we hope that the
23:42 presence of our witty rebuttal and his
23:44 replies might stop someone else from
23:46 falling into his orbit and if that
23:49 happens that a better world has become a
23:51 smidge more possible of course if we
23:54 were to time travel back to any living
23:56 room tavern or town center throughout
23:58 history we'd likely always be able to
24:00 find friends squabbling about the state
24:03 of society or going on long drunken
24:05 rants about how beowulf is problematic
24:08 but the truth is for most of history
24:11 those conversations simply didn't matter
24:15 in western europe up until the end of
24:16 the 18th century for example most people
24:19 were ruled by some kind of monarch with
24:21 pretty much absolute power to raise or
24:24 lower taxes start or end wars and
24:27 otherwise govern entirely as they wished
24:30 disagreeing with their decision-making
24:32 was generally frowned upon in the first
24:35 place given that most monarchs were
24:36 believed to have been chosen by god for
24:39 the role but even if you did your
24:42 options for forcing them to act
24:44 differently were basically limited to
24:46 launching an armed revolt
24:49 while people might have let off steam
24:50 about the rising price of bread then
24:53 they wouldn't have been under the
24:54 impression that their grumblings really
24:56 mattered and no one really thought they
25:00 pre-modern societies were strictly
25:02 hierarchical and it simply wasn't most
25:05 people's place to ask too many questions
25:08 from the 17th century onwards however
25:11 all that began to change
25:13 see during that century this societal
25:16 structure based around kings and queens
25:18 what we now call feudalism began to be
25:21 challenged by a hot young thing called
25:23 capitalism the colonial adventures of
25:25 britain france spain and portugal had
25:28 created the context for certain
25:29 well-placed merchants to grow
25:31 increasingly wealthy through
25:33 international trade and later
25:35 manufacture okay reading the script out
25:37 loud both the phrases colonial
25:39 adventures and international trade are
25:42 kind of doing a lot of work there
25:44 this rising class of proto-capitalists
25:47 was much more outgoing than the nobility
25:50 thus new institutions began to spring up
25:52 to cater for these desires such as
25:54 coffee houses and salons in which they
25:57 could meet for conversation and literary
25:59 magazines in which writers would debate
26:01 the merits of various competing theories
26:04 of art the key way in which this new
26:06 class of capitalists differed from the
26:08 nobility however was that they were not
26:10 beholden to the existing hierarchies of
26:13 political power their social position
26:15 came from their businesses not from
26:17 being the inbred grandchild of the
26:19 queen's third cousin it's no surprise
26:22 then that those coffee shops and
26:24 magazines soon began to play host to
26:26 discussions about political power how it
26:29 was being wielded and how it should be
26:31 wielded in the future one consequence of
26:35 this was that the emerging capitalist
26:37 class soon decided that having kings and
26:39 queens all was actually not super useful
26:43 through either lengthy processes of
26:44 reform or a quick guillotine and
26:47 monarchies began to be replaced by
26:49 albeit highly limited forms of liberal
26:52 democracy as important however was the
26:54 value that began to be placed on the
26:56 process of debate and deliberation
26:59 itself as a kind of essential expansion
27:02 pack to the formal act of voting because
27:05 the substitution of hereditary monarchs
27:07 with elected representatives meant that
27:10 suddenly those conversations about the
27:12 price of bread did matter in theory at
27:16 least if you were the local member of
27:18 parliament or congressman then you'd
27:20 better have a good explanation for why
27:22 those prices are soaring or you are not
27:25 getting voted in next time around
27:27 further this was a feature not a bug a
27:31 way of keeping those in power honest
27:34 where previously what the monarch said
27:37 now questioning how political power was
27:40 being exercised was seen as a virtuous
27:43 act and a social good
27:46 this early iteration of the public
27:48 sphere is often portrayed super
27:50 romantically take hamilton or blame as a
27:53 rabbler both of those musicals tremble
27:56 with the excitement of societies which
27:58 are learning to find value in vibrant
28:01 and passionate debate what hamilton also
28:04 hints at in its brief attempt at
28:06 feminism before all the women characters
28:08 are reduced to wanting to shaggle
28:09 emanuel miranda's self-insert
28:11 protagonist however is a clear problem
28:13 with this early public sphere it's
28:22 see there was a tension between the
28:24 theoretical egalitarianism of debate in
28:27 this enlightenment era and the reality
28:30 of a deeply unequal society in his
28:33 snappily titled the structural
28:35 transformation of the public sphere for
28:37 instance habermash writes of the
28:39 coffeehouses of 17th and 18th century
28:41 england that they preserved a kind of
28:44 social intercourse that disregarded
28:46 staked us all together
28:48 the tendency replaced the celebration of
28:51 rank with a tact befitting equals but
28:54 this discursive equality was largely
28:57 made possible by the fact that anyone
28:59 who wasn't a rich white dude wouldn't
29:01 have got through the door in the same
29:03 way that pre-20th century democracy
29:06 preached political equality while
29:08 denying most people the vote the early
29:11 public sphere presented itself as a
29:13 mechanism through which all people could
29:15 converse as equals whilst relying on a
29:17 very limited definition of who counted
29:22 in fact concurrent with struggles to
29:24 secure the right to vote the 300 years
29:27 since the public sphere first appeared
29:29 have seen marginalized and oppressed
29:31 groups having to fight to claim their
29:33 right to set out their stool in this
29:36 marketplace of ideas as nancy fraser
29:39 records in her seminal 1990 essay
29:41 rethinking the public sphere this is
29:44 often taken the form of groups first
29:46 establishing their own alternative
29:48 public spheres fraser highlights the
29:50 example of the late 20th century
29:52 american feminist public sphere which
29:54 found expression in the 1977 national
29:57 women's conference and in publications
29:59 such as miss magazine this alternative
30:02 public sphere gave at least some women
30:06 an opportunity to discuss specific
30:08 issues that they were faced with such as
30:10 the illegality of abortion and then used
30:13 the momentum already achieved to force
30:15 those issues to be discussed in the
30:17 mainstream public sphere or what fraser
30:20 calls the official public sphere this
30:23 coexistence of an official mainstream
30:26 public sphere with a myriad of
30:27 alternative public spheres which creates
30:30 space for specific marginalized groups
30:32 continues to this day and this isn't
30:35 simply a hangover from days gone by for
30:38 whilst these alternative public spheres
30:40 have become more and more visible to
30:42 those outside of them and while
30:44 conservatives love to whinge about every
30:46 tiny step that is made towards
30:49 diversifying the marketplace of ideas
30:52 the mainstream of debate is still
30:55 largely dominated by rich white dudes
30:58 according to a 2016 study carried out by
31:00 researchers at the university of oxford
31:02 for example just 0.2 percent of uk
31:05 journalists are black and only 2.5 asian
31:09 despite those groups making up 3
31:14 at the other end of the scale a stonking
31:18 of uk journals were privately educated
31:22 in comparison to just seven percent of
31:24 the population as a whole rather than
31:26 being a space in which we are able to
31:28 put aside social hierarchies of class
31:31 race gender sexuality and ability in
31:34 order to discuss the issues of the day
31:36 as equals then we continue to see those
31:39 same inequalities reflected in who gets
31:42 to participate in our collective debates
31:45 in fact while the phrase marketplace of
31:47 ideas has become a slightly cliched
31:50 buzzword it's actually a pretty useful
31:52 way to think about the public sphere
31:55 because at the end of the day it very
31:57 much is a marketplace just as those
32:00 merchants who overthrew feudalism
32:02 ensured that capitalism developed in
32:04 such a way that it would allow the rich
32:06 to keep getting richer so too did they
32:08 ensure that the public sphere would give
32:10 the voices of the wealthy the greatest
32:13 prominence while it's nice to think that
32:15 the best most rational ideas will always
32:18 rise to the top a marketplace of ideas
32:22 in which the super rich are able to buy
32:24 newspapers and tv channels or as we
32:26 discussed in my last video sponsored
32:28 dubious think tanks will always be one
32:31 in which ideas favored by the wealthy
32:34 will be able to drown out the rest the
32:37 ideals of openness inquisitiveness and
32:40 inclusivity which elon musk invoked when
32:42 he talked about the digital public
32:44 square then have always been just that
32:47 ideals and yet just as the deep deep
32:51 flaws in contemporary democracy are
32:53 interpreted by most as a challenge to
32:55 improve it rather than just give up and
32:57 ask the queen to resume absolute power
33:00 so too does the ideal of a truly
33:03 participative public sphere remain a
33:06 pretty good ideal to work towards
33:09 which brings us to the internet
33:12 because it wasn't the overthrow of the
33:14 old hierarchies which dictated who gets
33:17 to contribute to our collective debate
33:19 precisely what the internet was meant to
33:36 oh let's party like it's 1996.
33:40 i think one of the reasons that debates
33:42 surrounding free speech and the internet
33:44 gets so impassioned is that we were
33:47 promised that the internet would allow
33:49 us to overcome many of the factors that
33:51 previously constrained the public sphere
33:54 i've spoken before on this channel of
33:56 what richard barbruck and andy cameron
33:58 christened the californian ideology this
34:01 was the belief popular among silicon
34:04 valley executives and their boosters in
34:06 the media during the early 1990s that
34:08 the internet's enabling of direct
34:10 connections between individuals would
34:13 cause old hierarchies to crumble this
34:16 promise seemed particularly credible in
34:18 relation to public discourse i mean at
34:21 the most basic level there was just so
34:23 much more space online
34:25 newspapers and magazines can only have
34:27 so many pages before they become too
34:29 heavy to be delivered by children tv
34:32 channels only have so many hours of air
34:34 time to fill even without taking into
34:36 account how editorial decisions are made
34:39 there was therefore a pretty hard limit
34:42 on the number of people that could have
34:44 a public platform in a pre-digital age
34:47 by contrast the internet had space for
34:50 as many blogs or websites as could be
34:52 imagined furthermore no one had to ask
34:55 permission to publish online
34:58 as the legal scholar k clonic has
34:59 written before the internet the most
35:01 significant constraint on the impact and
35:04 power of speech was the publisher
35:07 whether you wanted to share your theory
35:09 about how the titanic was an inside job
35:12 or had written a fanfic about kermit the
35:14 frog falling in love with princess diana
35:16 getting that work to a meaningful
35:18 audience involved getting the approval
35:20 of a publisher editor or producer
35:23 willing to print or broadcast it the
35:26 internet however allows people to
35:27 circumvent such gatekeepers by creating
35:30 their own websites in fact both the
35:32 titanic and kermit the frog examples are
35:35 real things that exist on the actual
35:37 internet with seemingly unlimited space
35:41 and the ability for anyone to publish
35:43 pretty much anything without needing
35:45 prior approval from some jay jonah
35:47 jameson type it's easy to see why so
35:50 many people expected the internet might
35:52 lead to a more equitable participatory
35:55 public sphere unfortunately while the
35:58 internet may have found a way to
35:59 overcome the limitations of limited
36:02 paper or hours in the day
36:04 it became apparent that there was
36:05 another more important limited resource
36:08 that would continue to constrain it
36:10 attention see assuming you could master
36:13 some basic skills in html publishing on
36:16 the early internet was both cheap and
36:18 easy the problem was getting anyone to
36:21 actually visit your site you could maybe
36:23 ask someone with a more popular website
36:26 to include a hyperlink to yours or post
36:28 it in a forum discussion or maybe start
36:31 a chain email telling recipients that if
36:33 they don't visit the link and also
36:34 forward it to 10 of their friends
36:36 they'll be visited by a really spooky
36:38 ghost but the early internet wasn't
36:41 exactly easy to navigate it's no
36:44 surprise then that various services
36:46 quickly sprang up which sought to bring
36:48 order to this chaos
36:50 although not the first search engine the
36:52 company that will become synonymous with
36:54 the term google launched in 1998 with
36:57 ambitions to organize the world's
37:00 information and make it universally
37:02 accessible and useful and the particular
37:05 way that google's founders sergey brin
37:08 and larry page chose to organize the web
37:11 highlights a phenomenon which continues
37:13 to shape online discourse and debate to
37:17 see the thing that set google apart from
37:19 competitors such as yahoo and ask chiefs
37:22 was the algorithm that it used to rank
37:24 the thousands of results that searching
37:27 for any particular term would retrieve
37:29 that algorithm was called page rank
37:33 where other search engines might have
37:35 sorted search results in order of how
37:37 many times the search query entered was
37:39 included on a given page pagerank would
37:42 do so based on how many other websites
37:44 on the internet had linked to each
37:46 result it is in some respects a
37:49 democracy of popularity
37:52 that this system won out over other
37:54 methods of ranking search results is
37:58 because over the past half decade
38:00 there's been a fair bit of popular
38:01 concern about the potential for the
38:03 internet to foster echo chambers in
38:06 which the theory goes everyone is at
38:08 risk of disappearing into siloed
38:11 communities made up of only people with
38:13 whom they agree yet the popularity of
38:16 google's pagerank system and in fact the
38:18 entire development of the internet from
38:21 a formless mess of websites into a fully
38:24 indexed network dominated by a handful
38:26 of platform companies suggests quite the
38:29 opposite it suggests that most people
38:32 very much do want to have an idea of
38:34 what's popular among folks outside of
38:36 their own bubbles and the ability to
38:38 participate in a broader collective
38:41 conversation which brings us to social
38:44 media and it's worth remembering that
38:47 social media wasn't invented with the
38:49 intention of being a digital town square
38:52 early social media sites such as myspace
38:55 and friends reunited mostly revolved
38:57 around the profile page they were in
39:00 essence a way for your aunt jan to
39:02 establish an online presence without
39:04 having to learn what a css tag is
39:07 discussion functionalities were by
39:09 today's standards pretty limited even on
39:12 early facebook if you wanted to have a
39:14 debate with someone about whether the
39:16 star wars prequels were good you'd have
39:18 to choose your desired debating partner
39:21 navigate to their profile and post your
39:23 defense of jar jar binks to their wall
39:26 this will change with the introduction
39:28 of the feed the idea of a home feed
39:31 which collates the activity of all the
39:33 people you follow or are friends with in
39:35 a central place first appeared with the
39:38 launch of twitter in july 2006.
39:41 twitter replaced the profile centric
39:43 model of social media with something
39:45 that essentially felt like being in a
39:47 massive global group chat two months
39:50 later facebook tweaked this concept to
39:53 create its own news feed feature which
39:56 not only collated users status updates
39:58 but also other activities such as
40:00 changes in jobs or relation statuses the
40:03 introduction of the feed which has since
40:06 been imitated by pretty much every
40:08 social media platform going had the
40:10 important repercussion of making
40:12 anything that one did on social media
40:15 infinitely more public
40:17 previously the only way that my post
40:19 about how jar jar is a based legend
40:22 would have been seen by anyone other
40:23 than me and my idiot gungan phobic
40:26 debating partner is if someone navigated
40:28 to my friend's profile and saw the post
40:31 there with the birth of the feed
40:33 suddenly everyone and anyone my privacy
40:36 settings would allow were notified and
40:38 invited to add their thoughts too this
40:41 transformed social media from being
40:44 essentially email with extra steps into
40:47 a service through which users felt as
40:49 though they were contributing to a
40:51 collective conversation the feed made it
40:54 possible to conceive of changing one's
40:56 status on facebook or sending a tweet on
40:59 twitter as a meaningful act of
41:01 participation in the public sphere there
41:04 were certainly upsides to this new era
41:07 of social media facebook twitter and
41:09 youtube were all used by activists
41:11 during the arab spring and the occupy
41:14 recognizing that establishment media
41:17 outlets were unlikely to report
41:19 accurately on their protests activists
41:21 across countless movements and countries
41:24 during the early 2010s used social media
41:26 as a way to communicate directly with
41:28 the general public amidst what felt like
41:31 a pretty exciting time politically it
41:33 was tempting to think of social media
41:35 feeds as a kind of online tahir square
41:40 yet this perception of social media as a
41:43 digital public sphere
41:45 wasn't entirely accurate certainly the
41:48 digital space in which users were
41:49 engaging in passionate political social
41:52 and cultural debates were to a lesser or
41:55 greater degree depending on the platform
41:57 in question and one's privacy settings
41:59 public in the sense that lots of people
42:01 might see your post but in terms of
42:04 ownership they were decidedly private
42:07 this meant that the companies that owned
42:09 these services retained the ability to
42:12 set their own rules dictating what one
42:14 could and couldn't say on their services
42:18 the concerns that such a scenario
42:19 inevitably raised were only exacerbated
42:22 by the manner in which a small handful
42:24 of social media platforms gradually
42:26 began to dominate all others in my video
42:29 on the metaverse i draw on amanda lotz's
42:32 suggestion that social media platforms
42:34 are what economists call a natural
42:38 in short this means that the services
42:40 that social media platforms provide such
42:43 as allowing people to connect with
42:44 friends and criticize their enemies tend
42:47 to pull people to all want to use the
42:51 if the success of google's page rank
42:53 algorithm is the result of people
42:54 wanting to access the same information
42:58 the rise of facebook and to a letter
43:00 extent twitter is the result of people
43:03 wanting to be in the same place as
43:06 as much as white power bill might
43:08 pretend that he actually loves using dab
43:11 or parlor or truth social we all know
43:14 that he'd really much rather just have
43:16 his twitter account reinstated by the
43:18 mid-2010s then the beautiful yet also
43:22 pretty ugly kind of confusing mess that
43:25 had been the early internet had been
43:26 colonized by a handful of social media
43:30 and this must have been the moment we're
43:32 often led to believe that facebook
43:34 twitter and google began using their
43:36 ill-gotten power to censor anyone who
43:39 disagreed with the woke silicon valley
43:44 well the reality as you might imagine
43:55 yeah okay let's uh let's do some
43:57 censorship shall we then
44:00 sleep all day and uh
44:02 sensor all night that's uh
44:05 it's my bumper sticker my electric
44:08 it's uncomfortable so no matter where on
44:11 the political spectrum the person
44:12 raising the alarm sits debates
44:15 surrounding freedom of speech on social
44:17 media tend to be quite aware of the
44:19 problems that arise with these platforms
44:22 being controlled by a small handful of
44:25 but they tend to make the mistake of
44:27 assuming that facebook twitter youtube
44:30 and their peers are chomping at the bit
44:32 to do as much censorship as possible
44:35 headlines such as do social media
44:37 companies have the right to silence the
44:39 masses conjure up images of susan from
44:42 youtube humiliating a bunch of content
44:45 moderators into suspending more users
44:47 like alec baldwin and glenn gary glenn
44:50 ross emphasis is often placed on
44:53 statistics showing that employees of top
44:55 silicon valley companies donate far far
44:58 more money to the democratic party than
45:00 they do to the republicans
45:02 surely this is proof if proof is needed
45:05 the big tech is a hotbed of liberals or
45:08 shock horror leftists who are using
45:11 their positions to silence right wingers
45:13 at any given opportunity
45:17 no the truth is a little bit more
45:20 complicated for one employees of these
45:23 companies and certainly those in
45:25 positions of power tend to be democrats
45:27 in the joe biden nothing would
45:30 fundamentally change tradition of the
45:32 party rather than fully paid up members
45:34 of some entries caucus of the democratic
45:37 socialists of america
45:39 even the right-wing american enterprise
45:41 institute admitted that most tech
45:43 executives are best described as hippies
45:45 who dig capitalism and science
45:48 yet beyond this the history of social
45:51 media platforms has pretty uniformly
45:54 been one in which companies have been
45:55 forced into undertaking content
45:57 moderation rather than embracing it
46:00 enthusiastically see facebook twitter
46:03 and youtube were all founded by computer
46:05 science dropouts and this had a far
46:07 bigger effect on the early
46:09 organizational cultures of the companies
46:11 they founded than whatever their latent
46:13 political allegiances might have been
46:16 for executives and employees of these
46:18 new tech behemoths initially saw
46:20 themselves almost exclusively as
46:23 software developers their job was simply
46:25 to improve upon their platforms
46:27 underlying code and to add new features
46:30 or make existing ones that nanosecond
46:32 snappier in the early years of social
46:35 media content moderation was thus a
46:37 complete afterthought companies would
46:40 generally wait until the post was
46:41 actively brought to their attention and
46:43 then someone in the operations team
46:45 would give it a quick vibe check to
46:47 decide whether it should stay up or not
46:49 it was all very ad hoc
46:51 in fact facebook was up and running for
46:53 a full five years before it put together
46:56 its first content moderation policy or
46:58 hired any dedicated review staff
47:01 likewise youtube only developed its
47:03 first content moderation policy two
47:05 years into its existence
47:07 twitter held out even longer as other
47:10 platforms began blatantly implementing
47:12 these moderation policies twitter saw an
47:15 opportunity to present a lack of
47:17 moderation as its usp with one senior
47:20 staff member famously describing the
47:22 social network as representing the free
47:25 speech wing of the free speech party
47:28 this lackadaisical approach was made
47:31 possible by the fact that in their home
47:33 country of the united states social
47:35 media companies aren't legally required
47:38 to engage in content moderation at all
47:41 and in this they differ from traditional
47:42 publishers such as newspapers see if a
47:45 newspaper were to maliciously publish an
47:47 article which made the false and
47:49 defamatory claim that i had secretly
47:52 murdered my twin brother tim nocolus
47:55 then i could choose to sue not only the
47:57 journalist who wrote that article but
47:59 also the paper which published it the
48:01 logic here is that in conveying that
48:03 article to an audience the paper has
48:05 played an equal role in committing the
48:07 libel and is thus legally responsible
48:11 in the early days of the internet there
48:13 was the potential that the owners of
48:15 online chat rooms forums and social
48:17 networking platforms could similarly be
48:19 held legally responsible for any
48:22 defamatory libelous or otherwise illegal
48:24 content posted by users to their sites
48:28 which wouldn't be entirely illogical
48:30 much like newspapers these services are
48:32 providing a considerable boost to the
48:34 audience that the offending post or
48:36 image will receive indeed a couple of
48:39 civil lawsuits in the early 1990s saw
48:42 companies attempt to sue forum owners
48:44 for hosting allegedly defamatory posts
48:47 on their sites amazingly one of these
48:49 lawsuits was brought by stratton oakmont
48:52 the company founded and run by wolf of
48:55 wall street jordan belfort who must have
48:58 been flabbergasted to learn that someone
49:00 had used an internet forum to suggest
49:02 that his company might have been
49:03 involved in some fraud which
49:06 spoilers for the 2013 film the wolf of
49:08 wall street but stratton oakman
49:10 basically didn't do anything other than
49:14 wary that such lawsuits could stifle
49:16 innovation in the burgeoning online
49:18 economy in 1996 the u.s congress thus
49:22 introduced a piece of legislation which
49:24 would eventually enter u.s law as
49:26 section 230 of title 47 of the us code
49:31 the relevant part of this law read that
49:33 no provider or user of an interactive
49:36 computer service shall be treated as the
49:39 publisher or speaker of any information
49:41 provided by another information content
49:44 provider in short it established that
49:46 the owners of forums social media sites
49:49 and other similar services should be
49:51 viewed as intermediaries rather than
49:54 publishers the result being that they
49:56 were absolved of legal responsibility
49:58 for most content published to their
50:02 the european e-commerce directive
50:03 adopted in 2000 gives social media
50:06 companies a similar immunity in the eu
50:09 the question remains then if social
50:11 media companies didn't initially seem
50:13 all that interested in getting involved
50:15 in content moderation and if the legal
50:17 onus on them to do so is at best very
50:21 why do they bother because it's not a
50:24 fiction of elon musk's imagination that
50:26 facebook twitter youtube and the rest
50:28 have been more proactive in screening
50:30 content in recent years they very much
50:33 have did zuckerberg and dorsey pull some
50:36 dramatic heel turn and finally reveal
50:39 their censorious liberal agenda
50:42 again no the reality is much simpler
50:45 social media companies are companies and
50:49 companies like to make money
50:51 for several reasons this involves
50:53 setting some boundaries on the content
50:55 that they're willing to host firstly
50:58 despite the existence of an extremely
50:59 loud and obnoxious minority of
51:02 self-appointed free speech warriors a
51:04 more significant portion of the
51:06 population actually quite like the
51:08 platforms they use to be moderated a
51:11 2019 yougov poll of us adults for
51:13 example revealed that while 41 of
51:16 respondents were concerned about the
51:18 effects of content moderation on freedom
51:20 of speech a significant proportion still
51:23 felt that action should be taken against
51:26 users who post objectionable content
51:28 further regardless of what people say
51:31 the desire for some level of moderation
51:33 is evident in the choices people make in
51:36 which platforms to sign up for as i
51:38 discussed a moment ago in the early
51:40 2010s twitter tried to set itself apart
51:43 from its competitors by outright
51:45 refusing to remove any content at all
51:48 unless instructed to buy a government
51:50 even then often resisting such requests
51:53 in the courts for as long as possible
51:56 there were many cases in which this
51:57 policy served to protect the speech
51:59 rights of journalists and civil rights
52:03 but at the same time not moderating at
52:06 all left the door open for harassment
52:08 campaigns and an increasing swell of
52:11 far-right and conspiracist activity on
52:14 as david k writes in his book speech
52:17 police any laudable efforts twitter was
52:19 making to defend free speech were
52:22 overshadowed by a growing reputation as
52:25 an accountability free zone for
52:27 harassment and misogyny and nazis and
52:30 alex jones it's far from a coincidence
52:33 that the year in which the gamergate
52:35 harassment campaign reached its peak was
52:38 the same year in which twitter's
52:39 previously healthy growth slowed to
52:43 women people of color and lgbtq plus
52:45 users started leaving the site and while
52:48 all social media platforms suffer from
52:50 some element of extremism and harassment
52:53 when total inaction on those things
52:55 becomes your whole brand most normies
52:59 are probably gonna think twice before
53:00 signing up to give your service a go
53:03 as kate clonic writes platforms have
53:06 created a voluntary system of
53:08 self-regulation because they are
53:10 economically motivated to create a
53:12 hospitable environment for their users
53:15 in order to incentivize engagement
53:18 on the one hand then we have a clear
53:20 demand on the part of users for
53:22 platforms to take some action on extreme
53:25 and abusive content
53:27 people may disagree on where the line
53:29 between abuse and vigorous argument lies
53:32 but most people seem to think that there
53:34 is a line somewhere yet we should
53:37 remember that users are not the only
53:39 stakeholders that social media networks
53:44 these companies also need to appease
53:48 facebook twitter youtube tick tock all
53:51 of these services make the vast majority
53:53 of their revenue through advertising as
53:56 the old saying goes as users of these
53:58 free websites we're not really the
54:00 customers at all but the product twitter
54:03 and tick tock's business models revolve
54:05 around selling advertisers access to our
54:08 eyeballs but most companies don't want
54:11 to have their adverts appear alongside
54:13 extreme or abusive posts no one wants to
54:17 be the official breakfast cereal of
54:19 racism they already tried that with
54:21 marmalade the influence of advertisers
54:24 on platforms moderation policies have
54:26 perhaps become most obvious during the
54:28 various so-called adpocalypses which
54:31 have shaken the economy of youtube
54:33 whether it's pewdiepie paying some
54:35 indian guys to hold up an anti-semitic
54:37 sign logan paul filming a dead body in
54:40 japan or the presence of videos
54:42 encouraging terrorist acts advertisers
54:44 have shown that there are limits to the
54:46 kind of content they're willing to
54:48 advertise ni as happened in youtube's
54:51 case the need to keep advertisers on
54:53 side can thus provide a powerful
54:55 incentive to seek out objectionable
54:57 content and either remove it entirely or
55:00 suppress its reach it is worth noting
55:03 that there are also several countries
55:06 where social networks are either
55:07 required by law to undertake censorship
55:10 or have tended to comply with government
55:12 requests anyway to retain their ability
55:15 to do business within a certain
55:17 jurisdiction in thailand for example it
55:20 is legal to insult or criticize the king
55:23 faced with threats that the government
55:24 might block its citizens from accessing
55:27 the platform in its entirety facebook
55:29 has multiple times helped to enforce
55:31 this law on its own services by banning
55:34 groups and content critical of the
55:36 monarchy the company similarly works
55:38 with the governments of turkey israel
55:40 and vietnam to remove content that they
55:45 at the same time there have been
55:46 instances where social media companies
55:49 have refrained from engaging in content
55:51 moderation likely for similar reasons of
55:54 wanting to keep governments on site in
55:57 2017 the miami's military used facebook
56:00 to incite widespread violence against
56:03 the country's minority rohingya muslim
56:05 population in what the united nations
56:07 high commissioner for human rights
56:09 called a textbook example of ethnic
56:12 cleansing despite having developed a
56:15 pretty comprehensive
56:16 content moderation policy by this point
56:19 facebook did nothing
56:21 to apply a similar lens to the united
56:23 states whether one agrees with the
56:24 decision to ban donald trump from
56:26 twitter or not it's evident that he was
56:28 allowed to consistently break the
56:30 platform's terms of service with the
56:32 company only stepping in when he tried
56:34 to pull off an actual coup
56:37 all of this to say that the framing of
56:39 social media companies as being
56:41 desperate to do as much censorship as
56:43 possible just isn't borne out in the
56:46 history or present of content moderation
56:49 the motivation to moderate posts
56:51 submitted to their platforms has largely
56:54 been the result of pressure from outside
56:56 forces but to acknowledge this is not to
57:00 then immediately arrive at the
57:01 conclusion that big tech is good
57:05 rather it reveals that the problem is
57:08 much more fundamental than who owns
57:13 tech companies are profit-seeking
57:15 entities as such their decision-making
57:18 is only very very rarely driven
57:21 explicitly by their own ideology instead
57:24 it is driven by a calculation of how to
57:29 at its best this means trying to shape
57:31 community guidelines to increase
57:34 participation in these digital public
57:36 spheres by matching the desires and
57:39 expectations of users
57:41 at worst it means bowing to the demands
57:43 of oppressive regimes in order that they
57:46 can remain open for business in those
57:49 but at both these extremes they're
57:51 motivated by neither vice nor virtue but
57:54 by the simple desire to increase revenue
57:58 which then begs the question
58:01 if commercial concerns are such a big
58:03 factor in pushing social media platforms
58:06 to engage in content moderation
58:09 what difference would elon musk owning
58:11 twitter rather than its current
58:13 consortium of shareholders
58:24 wrap this up somehow shall we
58:27 being a bit of a beast
58:28 so there are several points which i hope
58:30 this video adds to the conversation
58:33 surrounding elon musk's perhaps now
58:35 aborted purchase of twitter firstly i
58:39 hope it makes it clear that content
58:43 complicated the notion that freedom of
58:46 speech and expression exist on this
58:48 single axis spectrum with less
58:51 moderation inevitably leading to more
58:53 freedom and vice versa is just not true
58:57 interestingly as musk has moved beyond
59:00 simply firing off edgy posts about free
59:02 speech to his adoring fans and
59:05 presumably begun to have conversations
59:07 with experts who have spent many years
59:09 thinking through these complicated
59:11 issues he did begin to slowly walk back
59:14 many of his early promises in june the
59:17 far-right activist organization project
59:19 veritas released a leaked recording of a
59:22 company-wide meeting of twitter's
59:24 employees attended by musk in which he
59:27 was invited to bring employees up to
59:29 speed with his plans for the service
59:32 right-wing commentators such as dinesh
59:34 d'souza and benny johnson along with
59:36 outlets including breitbart
59:38 enthusiastically shared the video in a
59:40 manner which might lead one to assume
59:43 that it represented a step forward in
59:45 their desire for a content moderation
59:47 policy which would see extreme
59:49 right-wing speech welcomed on twitter
59:52 certainly these activists might have
59:54 found some comfort in musk's highly
59:57 corporate non-committal response to a
01:00:00 question about how inclusive twitter
01:00:02 should be as a platform we really want
01:00:05 you know i don't know
01:00:07 at least a billion people on twitter
01:00:10 as many people as you can possibly get
01:00:13 that i think is the most inclusive
01:00:15 definition of inclusiveness
01:00:17 it's like all humans but musk's more
01:00:20 direct discussions of content moderation
01:00:23 suggested that he would have continued
01:00:25 many of the practices to which these
01:00:28 vociferous opponents of the supposed
01:00:30 digital censors at twitter are so
01:00:33 opposed early on in the conversation
01:00:36 musk drew a distinction between freedom
01:00:39 of speech and what he called freedom of
01:00:42 reach uh so i think people should be
01:00:44 allowed to say you know pretty
01:00:45 outrageous things that are within the
01:00:47 bounds of the law but but then they
01:00:48 don't you know it doesn't get amplified
01:00:51 it doesn't get you know a ton of reach
01:00:53 which was probably pretty disappointing
01:00:55 for our old friend nigel farage who was
01:00:58 certain that musk was going to ensure
01:01:00 that his tweets became required reading
01:01:03 for everyone on the platform even worse
01:01:06 from the perspective of the political
01:01:08 right musk had clearly done some further
01:01:10 research on how twitter had fared under
01:01:12 its earlier policy of not moderating
01:01:15 posts at all although obviously not
01:01:17 using the exact terminology musk seemed
01:01:20 to recognize that people in particular
01:01:22 those of marginalized identities simply
01:01:26 don't want to use platforms that are
01:01:28 dominated by abuse harassment and hate
01:01:32 you want to be as inclusive as possible
01:01:35 uh the broadest demographic um and for
01:01:38 that to happen people must like being on
01:01:40 twitter so if they're being like
01:01:42 harassed or if they're uncomfortable uh
01:01:45 they're just not gonna use twitter and
01:01:49 you know we yeah we have to sort of
01:01:51 strike this balance of you know allowing
01:01:53 people to say what they want to say but
01:01:55 but also making people comfortable on on
01:01:59 well they simply won't use it in ways
01:02:00 that chime almost perfectly with some of
01:02:03 the issues that we've explored in this
01:02:05 video musk was seemingly forced to
01:02:07 contend with the reality that anything
01:02:10 goes ethos is only empowering to those
01:02:13 who already have widespread power within
01:02:16 society for those who are more likely to
01:02:19 be the subject of targeted abuse or
01:02:21 hatred they can serve to only further
01:02:24 silence and marginalize
01:02:26 none of this particularly speaks to the
01:02:29 morals or ethics of musk himself in his
01:02:32 heart of hearts he may have wanted to
01:02:34 preside over a platform which promotes
01:02:37 the most hateful of content we can't
01:02:40 know for sure but musk is a businessman
01:02:44 and as we've seen regardless of any
01:02:47 philosophical debates about freedom of
01:02:50 transforming twitter into a profitable
01:02:52 company something which has eluded its
01:02:55 current owners would have necessitated
01:02:57 curating a digital space in which not
01:03:00 just right-wing blowhards but everyone
01:03:03 feels like they have the ability to
01:03:05 contribute their views without fear of
01:03:07 abuse and harassment targeted or
01:03:12 that's just market forces in action baby
01:03:17 i think i'm gonna keep it in which
01:03:18 brings us to the matter which should
01:03:20 really be central to any discussion of
01:03:23 social media but which often goes
01:03:25 overlooked see in a video about musk's
01:03:28 potential purchase of twitter comedian
01:03:30 turned youtube contrarian in chief
01:03:32 russell brand who i might make a video
01:03:35 about at some point in the near future
01:03:37 suggested that anyone concerned about
01:03:39 musk's bid for the company was being
01:03:41 insincere all we're talking about is
01:03:44 preferences over particular billionaires
01:03:47 with particular opinions this is
01:03:48 obviously a massive misrepresentation
01:03:51 i've seen no one argue that twitter
01:03:53 being partly owned by a saudi prince or
01:03:56 even being partly owned by an investment
01:03:58 company is a good thing
01:04:01 but in his haste to try and defend musk
01:04:04 and potentially try and lure him onto
01:04:05 his podcast brand failed to follow this
01:04:08 line of thinking to its ultimate
01:04:10 conclusion which is that the private
01:04:12 ownership of social media companies
01:04:15 might itself be the core problem here
01:04:18 see whether you're concerned about
01:04:19 social media censorship comes from a
01:04:21 fear of mythical woke executives and
01:04:24 employees taking advantage of their
01:04:27 power or from the fear of companies
01:04:29 being overly willing to fold to the
01:04:31 demands of advertisers the foundations
01:04:34 of that fear are essentially the same as
01:04:37 it stands social media companies are not
01:04:40 accountable to their users in any
01:04:42 meaningful way and users have no
01:04:45 meaningful input into the development of
01:04:47 content moderation policies
01:04:50 as such it doesn't really matter what we
01:04:53 want our contemporary public sphere to
01:04:56 that is simply decided for us
01:04:59 what options there are for changing that
01:05:01 scenario is perhaps a topic for another
01:05:04 video the political writers responded by
01:05:07 founding a series of alternative social
01:05:09 media networks such as parlor gab and
01:05:12 truth social but these simply replicate
01:05:14 the same problems but with different
01:05:16 people in charge services such as
01:05:19 mastodon provide a decentralized
01:05:21 alternative yet the tendency towards
01:05:24 monopoly and the social media space
01:05:26 means that the currently dominant
01:05:28 platforms are pretty likely to remain
01:05:30 the key players for all but the most
01:05:32 committed hobbyists and activists more
01:05:36 influential are likely to be the present
01:05:38 moves towards more effective government
01:05:40 regulation of social media the european
01:05:43 union is presently set to approve a
01:05:45 piece of legislation called the digital
01:05:47 services act which would among other
01:05:50 things require platform owners to
01:05:52 introduce due process for content
01:05:54 removal and more broadly try to force
01:05:57 social media companies to bring their
01:06:00 internal policies in line with
01:06:02 democratically established human rights
01:06:05 this is far far from an unproblematic
01:06:08 solution the electronic frontier
01:06:11 foundation has at times both celebrated
01:06:13 and criticized the specific proposal
01:06:16 but while we should certainly be ready
01:06:18 to criticize bad legislation on this
01:06:21 front this does not mean that the
01:06:23 broader notion of introducing democratic
01:06:26 oversight of a pseudo-public sphere that
01:06:29 is presently entirely at the whims of
01:06:31 the decisions of corporations is
01:06:34 inherently bad in fact as things stand
01:06:38 it may be the only truly effective lever
01:06:41 we have available to pull
01:06:43 perhaps there is also a scenario in
01:06:45 which we could go beyond this
01:06:48 if social media truly is the digital
01:06:50 public square should we not want it to
01:06:53 be public in all the senses of the world
01:06:56 should we not recognize that twitter and
01:06:58 facebook have become essential public
01:07:00 services and thus might be operated as
01:07:03 such as publicly or otherwise
01:07:05 collectively owned by those who use them
01:07:08 this might be optimistic
01:07:11 but despite what both his adoring fans
01:07:14 and most committed critics might think
01:07:16 it's likely that elon musk owning
01:07:18 twitter would only have had a minor
01:07:21 impact on freedom of speech and
01:07:23 expression because the real problem is
01:07:26 not which billionaire owns twitter the
01:07:29 real problem is that the platforms on
01:07:31 which our contemporary public sphere
01:07:33 rests can be owned at all and if we want
01:07:37 to see our public sphere become that
01:07:40 inclusive and inquisitive space that the
01:07:42 idealists of the enlightenment believed
01:07:45 that it could be
01:07:46 then it's that more fundamental question
01:07:49 that we must be willing to engage with
01:07:53 thank you so much for watching this
01:07:55 video i hope that it's been worthy of
01:07:57 your time if you've got any friends
01:07:59 either online or off or you think also
01:08:01 might be interested in it then i'd be
01:08:03 super grateful if you'd consider sharing
01:08:05 it with them maybe on social media
01:08:07 thanks as ever to richards david
01:08:09 brothers alan gann luke meyer gary
01:08:12 dickon spain bill mitchell al sveigart
01:08:15 zed see reese shab kumar alexander blanc
01:08:18 nielsen bildgard sophia r president
01:08:21 dwayne elizondo mountain dew herbert
01:08:22 camacho sergio suarez alexandra mcginnis
01:08:26 warton dyke nicholas jackmart strange
01:08:28 weekend ricardo fernandez de cordoba
01:08:31 richard rapoon udo elliott day malik
01:08:34 hamidi amit singh parahara
01:08:37 mead karen rosenow and gabriel coke for
01:08:40 being signed up to the top tier of my
01:08:42 patreon if you'd like to join them in
01:08:44 getting early access to videos copies of
01:08:46 the scripts to them and more then you
01:08:48 can find out how to do so at patreon.com
01:08:51 forward slash tom nicholas thank you
01:08:53 once again for watching and have a
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