Elon Musk Can’t Save Free Speech

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A video about Elon Musk, Twitter, Free Speech, the "Marketplace of Ideas" and Content Moderation on Social Media.

*Chapters*

00:00 Introduction: Elon Musk is (Not) Buying Twitter
06:49 1. The Problem with Free Speech
19:53 Curiosity Stream & Nebula
22:17 2. The Origins of the Public Sphere (or, the "Marketplace of Ideas")
33:25 3. When Debate Went Online
43:42 4. Censorship & Social Media
58:19 5. Why Elon Would Have Failed

*Bibliography*
You can find an annotated bibliography for this video on my website, here: https://tomnicholas.com/2022/07/why-elon-musk-couldnt-save-free-speech

*Some Copy about the Video for the YouTube Algorithm*

In this month’s video, we’re looking at Elon Musk’s attempted (and now seemingly aborted) purchase of Twitter.

In April 2022, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion. His stated goals were two-fold: Firstly, to rid the social media network of bots and other fake accounts. Secondly, to ensure Twitter was doing all it could to protect “free speech” on its service.

Over the past six months, Musk has joined the legions of activists on the political right who bemoan what they see as an overly-stringent approach to content moderation (or what they usually describe as “censorship") on Twitter. They claim that this is stifling public discourse and taking away users’ rights to freedom of speech and expression.

But what would a Muskian Twitter actually have looked like? Could he have seen-through his plans for securing “free speech” on the platform? Or is it all a little bit more complicated than that.

Join me as we take a dive into the ways in which discussions around freedom of speech tend to fail, the history of the so-called “marketplace of ideas” and what all of this might mean for how we look back on the attempt by Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

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Select footage courtesy of Getty

#ElonMusk #Twitter #FreeSpeech

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