Twitter and Elon Musk (which are practically one in the same) have gone/are going nuts; the last month or so has seen shameful levels of misinformation and bad takes. Before getting into the truly violent grit let’s look at the top-level stuff that you’d expect from any online environment where the free exchange of ideas is welcomed and celebrated (as in, what you’re about to see is not just a Twitter thing). I’m not sure how online you are, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen this pop up a lot:

Important: this tweet is from 2016, and the account no longer exists. I’m not sure whether Jennifer Mayers shut the account down out of shame and embarrassment because of the recent re-emergence of this tweet, or something else. The interview she did for Vice at the time suggests she, at least for a little while, considered genital comparison via ham sandwich a normal thing to do — both privately to herself (I imagine she has charts and diagrams?), and publicly on Twitter.

I think your brain has to be pretty mangled by Purity Discourse to post something like this; I’m not sure why she couldn’t just buy a ham sandwich without thinking about her daughters’ vagina flaps, and Taylor Swift’s, and their relation to Christian values. Now we know: satanic labia minora are easy to spot because they are engorged with sin. Control your flaps; tuck them in; do not emulate Taylor Swift, quite possibly the least sexual pop star that ever existed. Anyway…

I thank user @sloanefragment for resurfacing this image. I’m so glad the Dems finally unlocked the “why are you weird” achievement and we can at long last call people out for their unsolicited vulva chat. It’s unclear what took them so long. It’s giving me, a sickened, damaged cynic, a bit of hope. The American Right have been weird forever. They were weird in 2016 — as proven by the ham flaps — and they’re still weird now, and they will continue to get weirder and weirder as they scramble to cosplay at being normal by infiltrating communities and recommending harp teachers.

Existing in a free and open internet means that you may have to share digital space with genital over-thinkers (and you get to call them weird!) and also Elon Musk — who’s rampant posting addiction and miles-long skid mark of a follower base is causing election misinformation to pulsate aggressively across the platform. Last week he retweeted a fake article that said Keir Starmer was planning on shipping rioters to The Falklands, and since then Labour MPs have begun leaving the platform out of protest. He appears to be completely out of control. Twitter — or, X, sorry — is now a full expression of his dense sagging ego. It’s hateful, confusing, and full of trash. His right to free speech — mixed in with a lot of privilege — allows him to say basically whatever he wants in a public forum.

I’ve been working with Computer Says Maybe a lot recently, and they are in the middle of a podcast series about how the US legal system is trying and failing (but soon maybe succeeding?) to hold tech firms accountable for their various harms. The latest one has a lot about the first amendment and section 230 in it. I recommend listening not just because I worked on it but because this is genuinely a good and informative podcast — and it’s relevant to this discussion, especially when we look at what’s been happening on Twitter over the last couple of weeks.

The weird thing about the first amendment is that it somehow applies to corporate entities as well as individuals these days: there are those wonky Florida and Texas online speech laws that say platforms should not be able to remove content based on someone’s ‘viewpoint’ — these are laws fabricated by right wing people who are tired of having their hateful ideas moderated, basically. The courts say that such a law — which is meant to be a ‘free speech’ law — impedes on free speech; that a platform has a right to express itself through its community guidelines and the way it chooses to enforce those.

These laws definitely shouldn’t exist; it would be like hitting the off-switch on all content moderation efforts. But framing social media platforms as entities that have free speech kind of creates a huge mess. Do design decisions count as free speech? Is infinite scroll free speech? Recommendation algorithms? These things have an effect on what you see, like with the editorial decisions a newspaper makes, but they also effect how you see it: e.g. in large volumes all at once, and more of the same if you keep hitting the like button. Which… is nothing like how a newspaper works.

Furthermore, how do we untangle Elon Musk’s personal free speech from Twitter’s? Last year he was inconsolably upset when he found out that engagement on his Tweets was going down. So he asked that the recommendation algorithm be adjusted to promote his tweets straight to the top. And then even more people blocked him than ever before, lol. This was an ‘editorial decision’ made by him alone, and only for his benefit, to the annoyance of everyone else.

His actions would be fine if he was just a toddler taking dominion over a sandbox, but he’s a fully grown man making consequential changes to a global information platform. For whatever reason, people look up to him, and when he yanks out a clotted mess of bad takes and hateful opinions from his lizard brain (e.g. civil war is imminent in the UK!), and puts them into the internet’s salad spinner for discourse, the people — far too many of them — take it as fact.

I didn’t write all this to spoon feed you the very original opinion that Elon Musk et al need to take some damn responsibility for their actions. We all know this and have been saying it for just as long as the Christian Right have been Weird™️. It’s more about the sheer durability of the first amendment and it’s power to insulate entities from accountability. At some point, someone somewhere (I guess a judge??) surely has to draw a line and say that skewing facts at scale via the intentional design and redesign of algorithms is not protected by free speech.