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Twitter CEO Elon Musk has made an enormous present of portraying the location earlier than his takeover as a bastion of presidency censorship. He has coordinated with journalists to publish info referred to as the “Twitter Recordsdata” that recommend that the corporate was overly compliant in submitting to calls for from governments — particularly the U.S. authorities — to take down posts or restrict their visibility.
However new information means that, a minimum of by some measures, Twitter has turn out to be extra compliant with authorities authorities than earlier than he took over. Musk’s guarantees to shepherd Twitter into a brand new period of radical free speech are trying phonier by the day.
It’s evident that Musk has failed to meet his mandate of ushering in a brand new period of free speech to the platform.
In keeping with a report from Remainder of World, based mostly on information from Harvard College’s Lumen Database, within the six months since Musk’s arrival, Twitter’s compliance with authorities calls for for censorship or surveillance has risen to over 80%, from round 50%. The knowledge comes through Twitter’s largely automated self-reporting to the Lumen database, which screens authorities requests for content material removing on-line. In keeping with Lumen, out of 971 authorities requests obtained from final Oct. 27 — when Musk took over — to April 26, Twitter utterly complied with 808 requests, partially complied with one other 154 instances and didn't report a response for 9 instances. Notably, Twitter didn't report any outright refusals throughout this era, as pre-Musk Twitter did on occasion.
A number of the most worrisome requests have come from India, the place Narendra Modi’s right-wing authorities has bombarded Twitter with calls for to censor unflattering media portrayals of the governing celebration. Underneath Musk, Twitter blocked in India posts sharing a BBC documentary that questioned Modi’s function in a 2002 bloodbath within the Indian state of Gujarat. (Musk at one level stated he hadn’t recognized that Twitter was complying with India’s requests, and cited being busy with Tesla and SpaceX as distractions.) Twitter additionally lately complied with the Modi authorities’s requests to regionally block the accounts of over 100 politicians, activists and journalists because it carried out a manhunt for a Sikh nationalist chief. Earlier than Musk took over, Twitter was complying with about 20 p.c of India’s requests; it’s unclear the place that quantity is now.
One other authoritarian democracy, Turkey, has been essentially the most prolific submitter of requests to Twitter throughout Musk’s tenure, they usually’ve been overwhelmingly fulfilled. Underneath President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the nation has handed a number of rounds of legal guidelines limiting speech in recent times. Consultants say the federal government views regulating Twitter as a key software for suppressing dissent forward of this yr’s elections.
The Lumen information alone doesn’t essentially imply Musk is categorically friendlier to nations seeking to crack down on free speech in comparison with his predecessors. (There are lots of ways in which social media posts can violate legal guidelines — like posting false details about elections, for instance.) We’d want a extra granular investigation to parse precisely what these requests say. And which will turn out to be more durable to do sooner or later. In keeping with Remainder of World, Twitter stopped reporting information to Lumen as of about two weeks in the past — and it is unclear whether or not that is a deliberate choice or an error.
Nonetheless, given the place a whole lot of the requests are coming from, and the various latest high-profile examples of Twitter siding with governments quashing political dissent, it’s evident that Musk has failed to meet his mandate of ushering in a brand new period of free speech to the platform. It’s unclear how a lot of this ought to be attributed to incompetence or indifference. Musk has gutted Twitter’s workers globally, and it’s potential that a a lot leaner operation — particularly one missing institutional reminiscence — is extra possible to offer the inexperienced mild to authorities requests than it might’ve been in any other case. Musk has mentioned mass layoffs as a cost-saving measure and a strategy to reboot Twitter’s institutional id. But understaffing may clarify a part of why the corporate has been fairly cozy with governments and undermined that reboot mission.
It’s additionally possible that Musk underestimated the complexity of pursuing free speech insurance policies on a social media platform that operates in nations with vastly totally different political and authorized norms surrounding speech. Earlier than his takeover, he stated that “by ‘free speech,’ I merely imply that which matches the legislation” — as if a rustic’s authorized codes completely replicate its residents’ beliefs about free speech. After all that’s nonsense. Not all legal guidelines have standard backing, particularly in democracies with authoritarian tendencies. Previous to Musk, Twitter did generally refuse to again censorship requests or legally problem them in locations like Turkey and India, displaying some threshold for threat in response to oppressive use of the platform. If Musk thinks what he’s doing proper now counts as absolute assist totally free speech, then he doesn’t actually stand totally free speech in any respect.