How Elon Musk and Twitter can really fix free speech: act like a messaging app

Illustration by Alex Castro

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated” is how Elon Musk explained why he spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter.

That phrase — “digital town square” — has a long and messy history in social networking. Facebook and others have proven that throwing millions or billions of people into a single unfettered space is a mostly impossible and mostly terrible idea. But maybe we’ve just been defining it wrong. In reality, a town square isn’t a place where everyone stands in a crowd and yells at each other while advertisers throw things at them....

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source https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041754/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-messaging-app

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