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Elon Musk’s Twitter is fast proving that free speech at all costs is a dangerous fantasy | Nesrine Malik | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/28/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-donald-trump-kanye-west
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8051a251af3be54847bef8e863a9d679a537febb/0_81_3872_2325/master/3872.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

The ultimate cause of that demise will be the failure of Musk to understand that for some speech to be free, other speech has to be limited. It is generally true that if a service is free then it is by definition exploitative of its users – if you are not paying for a product, the axiom goes, then you are the product. But in the case of social media, the regulation of your speech is the product. If a platform becomes too toxic, then it is useless for anyone except those who want an extremist ghetto of agitators. In that sense, social media is very much like society in general. Political and legal authorities are in the business of content moderation, in order to make our shared space as stable and safe as possible for a majority of people. The public and other stakeholders, such as the press, businesses and social media companies themselves, are in constant negotiations with these authorities on what those limits should be – for instance, whether religious dress is protected speech, or what constitutes incitement to violence.

Old Twitter was far from perfect, and by its own admission its algorithms favoured rightwing accounts. But it was improving because of the drag that advertisers, regulators and users were putting on its algorithmic urge to encourage antagonistic activity. The high-speed destabilisation of Musk’s Twitter should be a warning to free speech absolutists. The set of curbs they object to are those that make users’ experience of social media, and life in general, possible; they protect against, among other jeopardies, libel, impersonation, plagiarism, misinformation and grooming. In essence, all our free speech arguments are about finessing, rather than obliterating a system of functional restrictions.

Those with power have more leeway to define what free speech is, but they can rarely do so without limitation. Twitter’s chance of survival is dependent on whether Musk chooses to accept that, like freedom of speech, his power is not absolute.

#Twitter #Free_speech

The Democrats’ midterms performance shows how Trump – and his imitators – can be beaten | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/11/democrats-midterm-donald-trump-joe-biden-republican-right-labour
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3e411a902ca9f2a65131efad2993be903e808f40/0_0_4500_2700/master/4500.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

The Democrats were much more focused, exhibiting “an incredible amount of message discipline”, as the party strategist David Shor put it to me, sticking to those issues where the American public agree with them and avoiding those where they are out of step. They refused to be drawn on to the terrain where Republicans wanted to fight – even leftwing candidates distanced themselves from the “defund the police” slogan – digging in instead on turf where Democrats enjoy public support, whether that be jobs, healthcare or abortion rights. The latter issue was especially galvanising, following the supreme court’s summer decision to overturn Roe v Wade and its constitutional protection of a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

But Democrats also made a case that some feared would bring no electoral reward. They pressed the argument that Trumpist Republicans posed a threat to democracy itself, reminding voters that this was the first election since the attempted insurrection of 6 January 2021, an event that too many Republicans excused and for which all but a handful refused to hold the former president accountable. Above all, Democrats cast as dangerously extreme the majority of Republicans who perpetuate Trump’s big lie that the election of 2020 was stolen.