Apr 8, 22 | 8 min read
Musk's acquisition of 9.2% of Twitter
Reading time: 7 minutes
Fake news, harassment and misinformation have always existed, but with the explosion of social media they have taken on greater dimensions. Now, we are asking ourselves how the Internet impacts our decisions, good coexistence as a society and social behavior.
Billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk brought this list of tonga consumer email issue to the fore by launching a poll on his Twitter account questioning the platform about its promise regarding freedom of expression. Immediately after doing so, this week, he bought almost 10% of Twitter shares. Curious, isn't it?
The results of that survey were even more interesting. The majority, 70%, do not believe that Twitter properly adheres to the principle of freedom of expression . In any case, it is a biased survey since it was directed at Musk's followers, so it has no scientific basis.
During this week, Musk also made more controversial tweets saying that he would work to “ make meaningful improvements to Twitter ,” and made another poll, this time asking if his followers wanted an edit button . Twitter quickly said that Musk will not be deciding on product roadmaps and that the edit button was being developed long before the billionaire’s poll .
The fact is that Musk has a history of complaining about Twitter's moderation tools, even though the social media platform did not remove even his anti-vaccine posts and bad "jokes" that even involved Hitler. For Musk, because of the moderation tools, Twitter's new CEO Parag Agrawal is compared to Joseph Stalin, for example.
Blaming Twitter, Facebook or YouTube (and even past and present generations) for impeding our freedom of expression is just scratching the surface of the whole problem. Manipulation, fake news and even censorship seem to be the daily breakfast for all social media users.
The big question is: who to believe? How can we learn to trust our own timeline? And how to prevent personal harm from it? In this article, we will discuss the mysteries about our freedom of speech and social media today .
A brief overview of the political landscape
One of the first episodes where people started talking about this topic was with the Cambridge Analytica scandal , which showed how the US Republican Party was misusing Facebook data to create voter profiles in the 2014 elections.
The backlash was the first indication of how social media is capable of shaping behavior . And it also led to many conspiracy theories, asking the same question: If we are being manipulated through social media, do we really have freedom of speech?
In other scenarios, political leaders such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have shown their appreciation for other social platforms, such as Telegram, which the Brazilian justice system wanted to block . However, other channels, such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, have rejected Bolsonaro for violating rules to prevent the spread of misinformation.
But it's not all bad news and scandals. Yes, social media has often been very useful in political scenarios.
For example, in 2011, Facebook and Twitter were very useful in organizing an uprising against the Egyptian government .
Furthermore, in Venezuela (where I am from), social media is very important for those journalists who have been excluded from conventional media, such as radio and television.
And in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, Ukrainian influencers used TikTok to share images of the war when mainstream media was not doing so. But at the same time, the platform was also used to share a lot of fake news about the war .
What about us, brands and digital professionals?
Is there room for us in this conversation? Even looking at both sides of the coin, it’s clear that there is a lot of debate about social media behavior and freedom of speech (and this debate goes far beyond a Twitter poll).
This is important for us as digital professionals. If an online environment is not safe and has no credibility, are you going to communicate your brand there?
With billions of people using social media every day, it's impossible for our businesses not to be there. So it's also our job to ensure a healthy digital place for everyone, right?
Recently, LinkedIn blocked jobs exclusively for black and indigenous people in Brazil. Many large companies protested, federal prosecutors opened investigations and activists filed lawsuits.
This caused LinkedIn to reverse its approach, leading the company to change its policy for Latin America. At the same time, other social media platforms, such as Facebook, pushed angry content into their algorithms just because it got more engagement, and this caused people to consume more time-consuming ads.
The scandal led to internal documents being released to the press showing, for example, that the company did nothing when it learned that Instagram could help develop mental disorders among teenagers. Facebook had even changed its name to Meta as a way to resolve the crisis, according to analysis by specialists .
