Elon Musk’s Twitter could make liberal activists miserable. Here’s why.

Elon Musk is not your typical billionaire social media company CEO. Unlike former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Musk makes no secret of his opinions. The candor would be refreshing if Musk weren’t also thrilled to offend and provoke.

Often his favorite targets are, as he unkindly describes them, “woke” activists who advocate for progressive social justice causes. Just days after the Twitter board accepted Musk’s offer to buy the social media company for $44 billion, he tweeted a graphic depicting liberals as having become more extreme over time compared to centrists and conservatives. In fact, research suggests the opposite is true. As many on Twitter argued, Congressional Republicans have moved farther right than their Democratic colleagues have moved toward the left, a point that of course was debated ad nauseam.

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Graphics like these amount to an easy dunk on social media. They light up the part of people’s brains primed for anger and tribalism without engaging in critical thinking. But Musk is not your average troll. He will soon control one of the most influential social media companies on the planet. Knowing full well that some progressive users are nervous about the changes his leadership will bring, he decided to tweet an inflammatory graphic that effectively mocks them. Musk occasionally says he doesn’t like the “extreme right” either, but his tweets this week made plain that he doesn’t care much for progressives or the Democratic Party.

What are progressive activists on Twitter, who’ve used the platform to make campaigns like Me Too and Black Lives Matter go viral, supposed to make of Musk’s barbed musings? The conventional media take is that these worried users are overreacting. They argue that Musk’s plans to bring more “free speech” to Twitter are too vague to be threatening. But that uncertainty is exactly what worries users when, in the meantime, Musk’s political opinions are quite clear. And though Musk leads pathbreaking companies, those workplaces have been described as rife with racism and sexism. This doesn’t exactly bode well for those who’ve been harassed, brigaded, or doxxed by fellow users who hurl insults at them based on their gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, or disability. If content moderation and trust and safety fall victim to Musk’s maximalist yet vague definitions of free speech, Twitter may become an even more hellish town square than it is now.

Dr. Sarah J. Jackson, Ph.D., co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center at University of Pennsylvania, is an active Twitter user with more than 17,000 followers and no plans to leave the platform — yet. Jackson studies how activism unfolds online and says her chief concern is the fact that some of the wealthiest men in the world have control over digital spaces and technologies that average people appropriate to achieve their own goals, which may ultimately conflict with the owners’ values. Progressives use the platform to champion their causes, many of which Musk appears to oppose. But unlike his peers in Silicon Valley, Musk can’t even pretend to be a neutral arbiter when weighing competing political beliefs given his recent statements.

Like others, Jackson is concerned that Musk misunderstands free speech as it is enshrined by law. Unlike the government, private companies have no obligation to protect freedom of speech and can reasonably restrict speech they find objectionable.

Jackson, co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, says she’s looking for certain signs that it might be time to leave Twitter. How Musk applies his vision of free speech to the platform is one of them, but also important is how the company under his leadership handles bots, anonymity, diversity and inclusion, and what content the algorithms favor.

While many bots serve a useful purpose on the site, like providing translation and closed captioning, many others are deployed by bad actors interested in sowing distrust amongst users. Jackson says that Twitter’s use of machine learning to identify bad actors and bots may not be perfect, but those efforts reassure wary progressive users who fear being targeted by personal attacks. Should the company’s bot policies drop this work to maximize freedom of speech, Jackson says some users could be “inundated with hate and trolling.”

Though anonymity allows users to shield their identity while harassing others, Jackson isn’t convinced that the solution is to require people to publicly identify themselves. If Twitter mandates that because Musk says he wants to “authenticate all humans” on the platform, Jackson worries it would silence activists who would otherwise become targets for doxxing by bad actors or tracked by law enforcement, a type of surveillance that Black Lives Matter protesters already experience. There’s no easy answer to this problem as anonymity also allows conservative activists to attack their opponents, but Jackson believes Twitter policy on this issue could be pivotal.

In recent years, Twitter has publicly committed to cultivate diversity and inclusion, a gesture that some activists who’ve experienced racism on the platform have found meaningful. Should Musk axe or significantly undermine those programs, Jackson says she would reconsider staying.

Jackson will also watch how the algorithms themselves, which Musk says he wants to make open source, privilege certain types of content. Twitter’s own research suggests that the algorithms favor content from the “mainstream political right.” If those views are further amplified, along with misinformation and disinformation, Jackson says that alone could make activist users feel like it was “no longer a space for them.”

If progressive users are deeply skeptical of Musk, Jackson says that’s a reflection of his behavior — and the expected terms of his leadership. Assuming Twitter goes private, Musk won’t be constrained by shareholders, a key reason why many CEOs are so circumspect.

“Elon Musk is the opposite of that,” says Jackson. “He gets on Twitter and makes fun of people he disagrees with politically. It’s much harder for anyone to believe a facade that these folks who have power in these media companies don’t also have an agenda.”