The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Everyone, it seems, is up in arms about Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter.

With the possible exception of all those stockholders who are about to make a fortune when he has to buy them out to take the company private.

And there’s the board, which decided to accept the offer after spending a few days pretending to put up a poison pill to block the takeover.

Why should anyone else care?

Because this is the most sensational news story going around on social media today. Don’t worry. Never fear. It will be gone tomorrow.

So the world’s richest man, who created the electric Tesla car and SpaceX wants to his own social media platform to dominate the discussion he describes as “free speech.”

Hint. Hint. There is no such thing today as “free speech” on Twitter, and there certainly won’t be any such thing as “free speech” if the takeover deal goes through. It will only be a platform for free speech for Elon Musk, once he owns it lock, stock and barrel.

Twitter will become all about him, and that’s what he really wants.

He can pin his opinions to the top of the feed where no one on the platform can miss them, edit them or block them.

Tech journalists will have no choice but to write about Elon Musk from now on, because he will be driving more traffic than Donald Trump ever did in his hey day.

Next he will decide he wants to buy the White House. Which if Trump’s experience in 2016 is any indication, that’s entirely possible.

Missing from this entire discussion is what the term “free speech” is actually about. In case you missed it, there is no absolute right of free speech in the United States Constitution.

The First Amendment only says “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”

It doesn’t say anyone can say anything they want on a private company’s premises or platform.

You can spout racist, homophobic expletives and threaten to kill your neighbors in your kitchen. But if you do it in public, there could be social, political and legal consequences.

When Facebook was new, for example, I had friends and relatives who thought they had free speech to bash me and contradict me on my personal page, in spite of the tools Facebook provides to moderate comments. Facebook allows people to choose their friends, delete their comments, even block other people from even seeing you on the platform. If you don’t want to get unfriended or blocked, you might want to consider being nice to people, or at least make your criticisms reasoned and reasonable.

Most Facebook groups have rules people have to abide by to be a member and participate. Some ban obscenities and most ban name calling.

If Musk wants Twitter to be more of a “town square” for reasonable discussions, he’s going to have to get the programmers to spend more time figuring out moderation, not how to make the platform more wide open.

In fact, if he wants to make Twitter better, that’s where the focus should be. He reportedly wants to add an edit button and allow for longer tweets.

If he really wants Twitter to become better than Facebook for having reasonable discussions and debates about important public issues, I don’t think he can do it without understanding the academic work of Elinor Ostrom, an American political economist, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons,” which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. To date, she remains the first of only two women to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

I wrote about this in-depth in the winter before Covid hit.

Part III: How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet

According to Ostrom’s model, now used by the United Nations and countries around the world in International relations, a group must have a clear identity and purpose.

“Who is in the group, who is not in the group, and what is the group for?”

A successful social media app would necessarily have a fair and timely way to conduct conflict resolution, just like countries do when faced with bad actor countries, which foster and support anarchy and chaos through terrorism and violence. This requires a system of “graduated sanctions.”

See what the Biden Administration is doing to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

Administrators must have the ability to monitor the behavior of the members and have support mechanisms that increase helpful behavior and reduce unhelpful behavior.

This is the theory behind why I do not publish hateful and false comments in my web interface as most other news media outlets do, or allow Trump trolls or other ignoramuses to run all over me in Facebook comments. Successful communication requires strong moderation. If you allow selfish bad actors to undermine the altruistic content, you lose, we all lose.

Democracy suffers and the planet burns.

I don’t know that much about Elon Musk, except that he apparently likes to smoke pot.

Good for him. So what?

Nobody in the American press is even asking much less answering these key questions: Is he an anarchist? A rat fucker?

Does he want to save democracy and the planet or burn it down so he can escape on his space rocket and be one of the few humans to survive?

If the most sensational story of the day gave us these answers, making a reasonable decision on whether to support or boycott Elon Musk would be easier to make.

I guess we will have to wait and see.

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