Twitter: Speech for the rich
Elon Musk has finally bought Twitter, fired top executives, and announced the first change he wants to make: charge 20$ to verify accounts and remove moderation.
Supposedly the aim is to reduce bots, and trolls and increase freedom of speech. But if you charge 20$ per month to verify accounts, many people won’t be able to afford it. Poor and young people would be the most affected. So those people would be the first denied a verified account.
The impact of charging money for having a verified account would be more significant on demographics that tend to earn less: people of color and women, especially women of color.
The aim of a verified account is to not be supplanted by, let's say, bots and trolls. But if there are demographics that would have a higher number of non-verified accounts, that means that the voices of those demographics would be easier to supplant and co-opt. By who? People who can afford it.
As we know, right now there are people paying trolls and bots to manipulate politics. In the same way that some people can afford lobbies, they could afford twitter verified accounts. And we do know that people have paid to increase followers. So what would prevent them to pay for verified accounts to spread their messages?
In practice, paying to verify accounts means giving more voice to people with money and silencing people without.
Unsurprisingly, several people have announced that they leave the platform once Musk took over. They don’t seem to believe that Muks’ plan is going to work to reduce trolls (or bots), not to increase freedom of speech. That means that even before implementing that policy, there has been a reduction in real people who aren’t trolls, and points of view have disappeared from Twitter: the opposite effect of increasing freedom of speech.
Musk seems to also be concerned about making Twitter profitable. Charging 20$ per month to verify accounts would initially increase income, which seems to be good to achieve that. In fact, lobbies might invest money to influence opinions there paying to verify the accounts that they already have and new ones by people chosen by them.
But that would only last if twitter remains as influential and relevant for discussion as it is today. If liberal and marginalized voices are driven out, the platform risks becoming too one-sided and losing influence. Young people might move to Tiktok, poor people might move to other free platforms such as Instagram and liberals might even launch a completely new alternative.- It won’t be the first time something like this happens. Like Facebook, Twitter has the advantage of being first and having already content. But in the same way that people's use of Facebook is declining, that could happen to Twitter.
So what alternatives have Musk to turn out a profit, increase freedom of speech and remain relevant?
Segment the market. Only allow verified accounts but make it free. Then erase all nonverified accounts. Bots would have more trouble becoming verified, especially if you make regular random verifying tests. And once you make sure that most of your accounts belong to people, you can analyze their data and sell it to marketing teams.
You can also create premium accounts. For example: what if a premium account has a few extra characters per message and is allowed to upload better-quality of images? Also, you might restrict video uploading to paid accounts. That way people would be able to tweet for free, but only upload videos if they pay. Memes require low quality, so they would still be there, but good pictures with decent resolution would require payment. And I’m sure that there are other features that might be worthy to people.
Twitter belongs to Musk and he would do what he wants. Right now that means Speech for the rich instead Freedom of speech. Would you keep tweeting or would you leave?
