- The world’s richest person Elon Musk is known for being a maverick as well as a business tycoon not flinching one bit from traversing a less traded path unlike many of his contemporaries and peers. The businessman is quite adept at grabbing the international headlines and is not lost on the people closely following the happenings around the world. The man never fails to make it to the leading features of news reports by stirring one or the other form of controversy is stating the obvious. Interestingly, Elon Musk is in the midst of yet another raging controversy for his unadulterated intentions to take over the extremely popular micro-blogging site Twitter.
PC: WEB EDITOR
- Of course, the mushrooming of social media platforms over the last few years has assumed an imperativeness as well as ubiquitous relevance in the lives of the majority of citizens cutting across nationalities. Especially, social media platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter are some of the leading entities boosting billions of followers closely identified with the medium. Now, his latest adventure widely articulated over the last few days is to pursue a hostile bid for Twitter claiming to help freedom in the world, whatever it means. Yes, it’s known everywhere that part of today’s democratic credentials is characterized by social media platforms being in a somewhat fraught relationship with free speech.
- Now, democracy and free speech are understood differently as connotations associated with the words need to be dissected in a nuanced manner to grasp the true meaning. Mind you, their struggle with moderating speech is a live issue across geographies, and India as a nation is no exception. As reported, despite only around 2% of Indians being on Twitter, the microblogging site still manages to have wide leverage even in our society and politics. There is any number of instances when the tweets originating from the site have created social disturbances leading to law-and-order situations. Nonetheless, Musk’s absolutist stand on free speech cannot answer questions raised by fake and/or toxic news and views expressed on social media platforms.
PC: Jessica Rangel
- Some of those have and can further translate into violence against persons or groups, and even compromise election integrity and other fundamental institutions of democracy. No denying the fact that there could be much greater transparency in various platforms’ moderation policies. Agreed, open-source algorithms would be advisable as these would be transformative in curbing the promotion of abusive content. Sadly, the bottomline is that the stakes are now too high for social media platforms to simply shrug off accountability for the content they host. Across the geographies, real lives that get wounded by hot armies is a fact that cannot be relegated to backburners. Musk is right that free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. Nonetheless, democracy thrives where dissent does. Ultimately, democracy cannot mean fake news, dangerous misinformation, and hate speech should have free rein.
