With the U.S. midterm elections less than two weeks away, Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter could unleash a fresh wave of election misinformation just as voters are casting ballots that will determine control of Congress for the next two years, political and media experts say.
Musk, the CEO of electric car maker Tesla, says he is a free speech "absolutist" and has vowed to loosen the reins on chatter within the social media app, which in recent years had striven to limit toxic content it viewed as dangerously false or discriminatory even as its global influence has widened.
Musk has also criticized the site's moderation policies in the past, and his plans to make major cuts to staff could hamstring the site's ability to police its content, which it has struggled at times to do in the past.How much influence a more loosely moderated Twitter would have on political discourse in the run-up to the Nov. 8 general election is not clear. Early voting has already begun in a number of states, and polls show most voters have already made up their minds.
The site has been a key political tool for years, offering politicians and activists around the world the ability to reach millions with largely unfiltered rhetoric. Twitter has played a role in organizing mass campaigns, including the #MeToo movement targeting sexual misconduct and the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East.
"Content moderation policies are only effective if there are people there to enforce them and systems in place to ensure they are being enforced. If those rules are going to be out the window, that is going to be incredibly harmful."THE TRUMP QUESTION? Following the 2016 presidential election, when U.S. security agencies concluded that Russia had surreptitiously used social media to mount influence campaigns aimed at manipulating the outcome, Twitter and other social media sites ramped up their efforts to prevent the spread of misinformation, with mixed success.
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