By Maysam Najjar
Elon Musk recently garnered the attention of the Australian PM in a post on his platform X with a single word: “Fascists.”
The comment was in response to a news post stating that “Australia wants to fine internet platforms up to 5% of their global revenue for failing to prevent the spread of so-called misinformation online”.
Issues surrounding misinformation are not unique to X. Mark Zuckerburg faced pressure from the White House in 2021 to crack down on misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic and was reported to have removed 18 million posts from Facebook as a result.
TikTok also faced similar pressure from governments around the world, the video-sharing app repeatedly under fire for its role in the spread of misinformation.
The company collaborated with Adobe-Founded Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) to combat the issue, which involves labelling content that is AI-generated.
Musk’s remarks raise the fundamental question as to whether platforms have a social responsibility to protect users from harm that they might incur online.
Those who promote “freedom of speech” and are apprehensive of attempts to control it often speak out against attempts to moderate content. They tend to compare attempts to do so to 1984, a dystopian novel by George Orwell that depicts a totalitarian society with extreme censorship, where citizens are strictly prohibited from sharing, or even thinking about, any ideas that are inconsistent with the values of those in power.
However, a lack of censorship has seen online spaces becoming so oversaturated with misinformed and problematic content that these platforms are almost impossible to use.
X is notorious for this, especially following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022. Forbes reports that Musk fired half of X’s internal moderators and a third of the platform’s trust and safety team globally upon taking ownership.
He also offered users the ability to purchase a Blue Checkmark verification badge; something that originally functioned as a symbol of legitimacy for public figures can now be purchased for $8 a month by anyone.
These decisions have unsurprisingly created a breeding ground for hate speech and abuse, misinformation and unsolicited spam.
Comment sections are filled with bot accounts and content spam, as well as “rage-baiters”, accounts posting explicit, provocative and sometimes blatantly false content with the goal of garnering interactions.
The algorithm itself promotes harmful and misinformed content. Following the introduction of the For You tab as the default home page on X, users are now exposed to a wider variety of content and posts from accounts that they don’t follow or associate with.
The issue is that the algorithm tends to spotlight posts that get a lot of attention, and they’ll often appear on your feed without warning.
Many of these viral posts and accounts are alarming and problematic, with high like and retweet counts on tweets containing extremist right-wing content, outward support of racism and eugenics, and ableist and homophobic rhetoric.
In fact, the polarisation of political discourse has resulted in a surge of misleading and unsupported data and information shared on X, and many of these accounts veer towards engagement bait over authentic discussion.
A lack of moderation also raises social concerns. Unmoderated pornography has resulted in a proliferation of OnlyFans creators and “porn bots”, so much so that almost every viral tweet has a mass of accounts promoting their explicit content in the replies.
The platform has also seen an increase in both the size and accessibility of pro-anorexia spaces, with viral posts being pushed by the algorithm and easily accessible hashtags. The introduction of Twitter Communities has allowed for groups to accrue hundreds of thousands of members, many of them minors. These numbers fail to factor in other existing sub-communities in which self-harm and drug use are promoted and glorified.
Is moderation here necessary? Elon Musk doesn’t seem to think so.
“Moderation is a propaganda word for censorship,” Musk said in an interview on the Don Lemon Show.
Social media has many functions, in that it provides a tool for the dissemination of information, sharing of opinions and connection with like-minded people.
But engagement and meaningless sensation should not take precedence over the potential for broader social harm.
Bill Shorten, the Minister for Government Services in Australia, points to a perceived inconsistency in Musk’s attitude.
“When it’s in his commercial interests, he is the champion of free speech,”said Shorten. “When he doesn’t like it, he’s going to shut it all down.”
Featured Image: Elon Musk’s account on Twitter/X is displayed on a smartphone. Photo: Alpha Photo/CC/flickr