It's not surprising then that, within days of his takeover of Twitter in October, Musk fired most of the company's content moderators and other “trust and safety” roles at the company. According to this worldview, only by removing communication guardrails can a truly free, accessible and open public space emerge. The journalist ban is a paradoxical move for Musk, who along with others in the tech world, has long pitched a hyper-libertarian view of free speech as an essential ingredient to an ideal society. Just look at what happened on Twitter last month, when dozens of journalists critical of Musk were suddenly banned from the platform. The rest of our access to these privately owned public spaces can be-and often is-curtailed, all without us knowing exactly why. Whenever any private company is forced to make choices about the nature of content in the conversation it hosts-whether it be Facebook or Twitter, or a bank that owns a plaza, and must decide what protests to allow there-a company and its leaders determine who gets to say what. Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, who tweeted last fall that he had acquired the platform “because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital square,” is only the most recent example.īut while a privately owned public space like Twitter might seem like a space for public discourse-after all, just about anyone can tweet or read tweets-it is not. This is because, at least in part, tech leaders have long encouraged us to view them as such. The idea of social media platforms like Twitter functioning as “digital town squares”-that is, public places for free speech and civic discourse-has long been ingrained in the public consciousness.
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