Having fewer Nazis on Twitter is good, actually

Jordan Weissman on what Twitter used to be like when Nazis had more access to the platform and why the current policies are better:

Thankfully, Twitter’s Nazi problem has felt a little less severe in recent years. Back during the 2016 election, when Donald Trump’s first run for the White House helped turn social media into a white supremacist jamboree, having some anonymous groyper tell me to jump in an oven was just another day at the office. These days, something I say really has to go viral and reach a large swath of right-wing accounts before the bigoted shitposters start to show up in numbers.

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This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

Like pretty much any journalist who compulsively wastes too much of their life on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of unpleasant experiences with the site. In part, that’s because I’m Jewish, and I occasionally find my mentions flooded by antisemitic trolls who think it’s the height of wit to throw an echo around my name—as in “we see you (((weissmann)))”—in response to some tweet they don’t like. It’s a hazard of the site that you learn to live with.

Thankfully, Twitter’s Nazi problem has felt a little less severe in recent years. Back during the 2016 election, when Donald Trump’s first run for the White House helped turn social media into a white supremacist jamboree, having some anonymous groyper tell me to jump in an oven was just another day at the office. These days, something I say really has to go viral and reach a large swath of right-wing accounts before the bigoted shitposters start to show up in numbers. Advertisement

Suffice it to say, I’m feeling a little bit apprehensive about what exactly Elon Musk plans to do with Twitter, assuming he actually closes his deal to buy the company. The Tesla and Space X founder describes himself a free speech “absolutist” and has regularly criticized the site’s content moderation practices for supposedly trampling on discourse. There’s now a widespread assumption he’ll try to loosen those policies.

“I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he recently tweeted. “If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.” In practice, that would mean allowing all sorts of hate speech and grisly, violent material Twitter currently bans, a prospect that seems to be exciting the hard right. A number of banned neo-Nazis tried to set up new accounts shortly after the news of Musk’s deal broke, though they were quickly kicked off.

How much could Musk undo? Quite a bit. In its early days, Twitter had an anything-goes attitude toward content moderation. But, spurred on by the harassment campaign unleashed by Gamergate and the toxicity of the 2016 election, it began to take a more proactive approach on issues like harassment, hate speech, and misinformation, using a combination of more stringent policies and new platform features that helped make it a leader in the industry.

Some examples: It got more aggressive about banning accounts and booted hard-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones well before competitors like Facebook. It partnered with academics to try and measure the health of conversations on the platform, rolled out safety features to prevent harassment, and put in place policies to combat transphobia, such as banning “deadnaming.” In 2020, it expanded its policy against hateful conduct to bar “language that dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity and national origin” and permanently banned former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. It started labeling misinformation and has also worked to limit lies about COVID, barring Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account for flouting those policies. And of course, it famously dumped Donald Trump from the platform.

It’s hard to say objectively how much of a difference these steps have made to daily life on the platform. But experts in the field say the changes have made a serious difference. Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told me she’s seen a major drop in the number of hate groups operating on the platform. “There are far, far, far fewer of them on Twitter today than there were before,” she said. ”And I think those who have stayed on have been inhibited from saying more extreme things.”

Well, one could listen to the research done by actual experts, or to blowhards who think that invoking “free speech” at the highest level of abstraction provides answers to any interesting question. The choice is yours!

Again, nobody really thinks that “free speech” means that “everybody must have unlimited access to the social media platform of their choice. In fact, large platforms that want to be usable for more than a very narrow group of people need to be actively moderated. Reasonable people can disagree about how tradeoffs should be made in marginal cases, but the trite observation that “free speech” is a sound principle tells us nothing about how to resolve them.