is one thing, but lawmakers won’t be too happy if foreign states are all over the platform openly undermining American interests and subverting its democracy. For Musk, it could be almost unsustainably chaotic - in a way that worsens things back home. That’s especially true if he wants to “continue to fly around the world and shake the hands of authoritarians,” as Facebook’s former security chief Alex Stamos pointed out on Twitter.īalancing all this was always difficult for the people who ran Twitter full-time.Musk’s show of responding to calls for new content policies makes it that much harder for him to dodge the difficulties on these issues. And some accounts that exist to boost international governments have begun to ask Musk to remove labels that Twitter’s prior leaders put on them.A holding company run by a powerful Saudi prince (and of which the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund owns a significant chunk) is now Twitter’s second-largest shareholder despite Musk’s criticism of the country’s free-speech record.For instance, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev lavished praise on Musk while trying to get him to stop supplying Starlink to Ukraine.And then there is a long list of countries with much less internet freedom to begin with, such as Iran, Russia, and especially China, where Tesla has a lot of business interests that Beijing might well think about using as leverage.Īt the same time, international governments already seem to be trying to ally with Musk, influence him, or draw him (further) into their own foreign policy struggles.Turkey is moving toward penalizing the spread of misinformation with multiyear jail sentences.
India, where the government has blocked certain posts and local officials are responsible for compliance in a way some observers have compared to hostage-taking, is standing up a board to examine content moderation decisions.The bloc’s leaders are already watching Musk. There’s the EU, of course, where the Digital Services Act will try to curb viral “dangerous disinformation” and will force companies to put in place systems for flagging illegal goods and content for faster removal.Take, for instance, the major world regions where the minimally moderated Twitter that Musk wants to see is going to run into legal problems. The truth is, though, that Musk’s headaches at home may prove miniscule compared to the pressures he’ll face abroad. market or the company’s San Francisco HQ.
During Elon Musk’s first few days in charge of Twitter, he retweeted conspiracy theories about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, began to get rid of the people who make the site the tolerable, and oversaw a spike in hate speech despite promising advertisers he wouldn’t let the service “become a free-for-all hellscape.” Many of those controversies arose in the U.S.
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