The Breakdown - The World's Biggest ‘Free Speech’ Experiment Has Begun

Starting point is 00:00:00 Is there even the outside possibility that this becomes some truly quasi-philanthropic thing? To the extent that Elon is serious about the high-minded ideas and believes that this is more important than just a corporation or a bottom line, could he actually create something that is fundamentally different and more open from within this framework? Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.i.o, Arculus, and FtX, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys?

Starting point is 00:00:39 It is Tuesday, April 26th, and today we are talking about the beginning of the world's biggest free speech experiment. Briefly, before we get into that, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or come join us on the Breakers Discord. It's where we chat about this topic and so many more, and you can find it at bit. dot LY slash breakdown pod. Also a disclosure, as always, in addition to them being a sponsor of the show, I also work with

Starting point is 00:01:06 FTX. So after weeks of back and forth in speculation, Elon Musk has finally purchased Twitter. Twitter and Elon have come to an agreement that will see Elon take the company private. Last night, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey tweeted a thread. It started with a link to the Radiohead song, Everything in its right place. And from there, Jack says, love Twitter. Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness. The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always

Starting point is 00:01:40 been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step. In principle, I don't believe anyone should own or run Twitter. He wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it Being a company, however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness. Elon's goal of creating a platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is the right one. This is also Parag Agrawal's goal and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path, I believe it with all my heart. I'm so happy Twitter will continue to serve the public conversation, around the world and

Starting point is 00:02:23 into the stars. There are a lot of themes in that thread that we will come back to. Elon, for his part, posted a yes surrounded by emojis and an image of a quote from him. 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. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential. I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it. The takes around this are roughly what you would imagine. On the one side are those who are crowing about how bad this is for democracy. Senator Elizabeth

Starting point is 00:03:06 Warren tweets this deal is dangerous for our democracy. Billionaires like Elon Musk play by a different set of rules than everyone else, accumulating power for their own gain. We need a wealth tax and strong rules to hold big tech accountable. Another part of the bad for democracy take was about his free speech absolutism. George Monbiot, an environmental and political activist writer, tweets, Elon Musk's free speech absolutism is lethal. Persuasion is the primary determinant of human action. Hate speech leads to acts of hate. Lies destroy democracy. Curbing hatred and lies preserves other essential freedoms. Musk's vision for Twitter is not a promise but a threat. Every freedom needs to be protected from every other freedom. Aggregate freedom requires a balance,

Starting point is 00:03:46 between specific freedoms. But there's something about this issue that, though it is innately complex and fascinating, excites the crudest and most simplistic thinking. Some people shout freedom than imagine they have won an argument. Another part of the concern side of the discussion is a notion that free speech isn't just about content moderation or lack thereof, but about the power of certain actors to amplify their content over others. Edward Perez, who's the director of product management at Twitter, writes, given the reality of adversarial actors, with access to the amplifying power of concentrated capital and influence, many of whom seek to cause division and undermine democracy, any discussion about free speech on social media platforms that ignores

Starting point is 00:04:24 this fact is missing the mark. Then, of course, on the other side is that this is great for democracy, folks. Many are focused on the content moderation that suppresses voices. Tyler Winklevoss of Gemini says, when Elon Musk owns Twitter, we will finally learn how sinister and politically motivated the shadow banning and algorithms were and how dangerous they were to our democracy. Some are talking about how there is more room for moderation than the critics are saying. Investor and podcaster David Sacks says free speeches never meant anything goes. There's plenty of case law on that. What it means is you don't get to make up the rules as you please in order to censor your political opponents. There are also lots of middle ground people who just don't think this is as political

Starting point is 00:05:03 or important as it's being made to be. Avi Feldman writes, Twitter has always been centralized. Elon buying it may or may not have the centralized entity do things that are good for the open-source decentralized world. My bet is that it's good for our mission in crypto, but if it isn't, it doesn't matter. Twitter was never open anyways. Along those lines, Mike Dutis writes, does anyone really think Twitter has anything to do with the decentralized future at this point? Twitter ownership is a sideshow, in my opinion. There is another group who are talking mostly about the specifics of what Elon says he plans, and frankly, I find this part of the discussion to be the most productive. Around this idea of open algorithms, Venkatish Rao writes,

Starting point is 00:05:39 Jack wanted to let anybody write their own feed algorithm against the API, if I recall correctly. That's really the big potential win here. If I can make or more likely select from a marketplace, a feed algorithm to suit me, I kind of don't give a shit what the free speech crowd does. It will also take the wind out of the sales of free speech posturing by creating a meaningful exit option. Right now, the best in-platform exit option is protected tweets and that is no good. As it stands, only crude mutant block mechanisms exist and they don't scale. Others are more focused on this idea of authenticating all humans. Karim Rafi, an anti-authoritarian advocate, says Bashir al-Assad just implemented a law that would

Starting point is 00:06:18 imprison anyone who criticizes his regime online for 15 years. Forcing Syrians to authenticate themselves on Twitter would be extremely dangerous. Many people in the Syrian diaspora also choose to stay anonymous because our family members at home face retribution, harassment, arrest, kidnapping, torture, execution for our anti-Assad activity abroad. However, a counterweight to that risk comes from Dave Birch, who writes, Notice that he says authenticate and not identify. Hence, my prediction that is a person will be the most valuable credential of all.

Starting point is 00:06:48 So perhaps there is a zero-knowledge type of mechanism that Elon has in mind. Either way, when you cut through a lot of it, there is some amount of productive discussion around the specific proposals that seem to be a part of Elon's plans. And then, of course, there are the individual takes, singular and relevant in who they come from, and the top of those has to be Jeff Bezos. Mike Forsyth, an investigative reporter at the New York Times tweeted, apropos of something, Tesla's second biggest market in 2021 was China after the U.S. Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla's electric vehicles. After 2009, when China banned Twitter, the government there had almost no leverage over the platform.

Starting point is 00:07:26 That may have just changed. Bezos, who, as you will remember, is the owner of the Washington Post and the head of Blue Origin, SpaceX's biggest competitor, quoted that tweet that I just said, read from investigative reporter Mike Forsyth and added, interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square? I have been living in this conversation for sure for the last 24 hours or so, but just for the last few weeks as well, as you guys who listen to the show every day well know. One of the things that I find most difficult about it is that there is an immense partisan

Starting point is 00:07:57 dimension of this that is obfuscating so much, not least of which is the fact that Twitter's current ownership hasn't been like some paragon of virtue. I actually think that the partisan dimension of the debate around Twitter is not just Twitter's alone. It begins with Facebook in 2016. And the Russian bots that, to so many liberals and Democrats, became the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election. That made liberals up in arms at social media.

Starting point is 00:08:25 And in some ways, I think that Twitter's banning Trump was this capstone on an event that calcified and hardened the debate around social media censorship and platforms as an entirely partisan issue. Now, there are plenty of people who do break out of that framing. I asked on Twitter whether there was anyone on the left who was excited about Elon and anyone on the right who was concerned, and I got some good responses. Doesn't surprise me at all that my listeners are folks who are able to hold complex ideas in their head and break out of partisan normalcy, but I kind of still think it's an exception proves the rule sort of thing. And because this debate, given especially, especially, Twitter's banning of Donald Trump, is so part.

Starting point is 00:09:05 partisan. There's a lot of pretense and a lot that you have to wade through to try to get to something meaningful underneath. It's hard not to feel like it wouldn't be exactly the reverse if the sides were reversed. In other words, if a sitting Democrat had been deplatformed, that we basically have a complete switcheroo in terms of who was supporting what position. For what it's worth, I think that's a pretty good argument that we should be more concerned about the freedom of speech side of the argument. In other words, if our belief is that any side who had their person's silence would be up in arms. That makes me want to err on the side not of the victors who got the deplatforming done, but for the side of more consideration for voices and not fundamentally

Starting point is 00:09:44 cutting them off. However, hold aside the partisanness of the discussion. There's something else that I find problematic. Both sides are so, so focused on the moderation side of the discussion, when to me that does not seem to be the primary or at least the root issue. It seems again to me to validate the point that this became what it became when Trump was pushed off the platform. Now, that's not to say that there aren't tons of moderation issues. Let's assume that you're in the camp that thinks that there should be some moderation policy somewhere, which not everyone is. There are still lots of questions, specifically such as,

Starting point is 00:10:22 one, opacity around the moderation policy itself. How knowable and communicated it is what is and isn't acceptable. Two, opacity around the decision-making process on censoring or taking down a specific tweet, or deplatforming a specific person? How clear is it who makes those decisions, and how clear is it who makes those decisions, and how do they actually make them? Given that almost everything in real life is in a gray area, no matter how well-articulated your policy is. Three, what is the appeal system? Is there a well-communicated or clear process for people appealing decisions? Four, accountability. Is there a culture of accountability or regular reviews of the decision-making process,

Starting point is 00:10:59 or just the decisions being made themselves, to make sure they're not calcifying based on subjective or partisan opinion? Even with all these real challenges around moderation, I still think that they're all ultimately questions about how to clean up another larger issue, which I believe is the relationship of the business model and the algorithm. Looking for ways to step up your crypto game? Then go with Nexo. For starters, you get free crypto for each purchase or swap. How about earning guaranteed yields?

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Starting point is 00:13:15 Human attention is such that radical, shocking things capture that attention. So an algorithm, focused entirely on engagement left to its own devices, is likely going to prioritize those shocking, radical things. Of course, there are human agents who work hard to try to design algorithms to prioritize a balance of things that aren't just shock and awe. But at the end of the day, there is still this insidious loop between the growth imperative needing more attention and where more attention tends to come from.

Starting point is 00:13:43 This is the inescapable challenge of advertising as a business model in social media. This is a bit of a rough analogy, but to some extent it reminds me of the difference between philanthropy and changing social and economic systems. Philanthropy and charity and all of these things that are incredibly important to make sure that people don't fall completely through the cracks are still ultimately dealing with the negative externalities of the way, that other parts of the system are designed, either from a political or an economic perspective.

Starting point is 00:14:14 I believe that the safety nets that private philanthropic and charitable organizations create are a key part of moving a society forward and solving problems and challenges that were created by system design decisions in just the slow accumulation of history that happened potentially years and years and years in the past. But doing good work philanthropically or charitably doesn't mean we can take our eye off the ball of changing the underlying systems which create those externalities in the first. first place. It sort of feels to me like the moderation conversation is in that slot as compared to the systems change, which I believe has to do with the business model itself and the algorithms

Starting point is 00:14:50 that support it. So with all of this, what's the answer? I don't know, honestly, if Elon is the answer, but I know that Wall Street is not. To the extent that we are dealing with a question not just of content moderation policy, but this more fundamental question of the relationship between the business model and what content the technology underpinning the platform prioritizes, a much more radical shift might be required. This almost certainly will have impacts on the business in the short term. Wall Street is not optimized for long-term visions of public utilities and public goods. It's designed to capture value from and reflect the value of publicly traded corporations. We can debate and lament the prioritization of short-term quarterly earnings values versus

Starting point is 00:15:32 long-term thinking, but at the end of the day, it's very, very hard to imagine a company that could get away for long with making any decision that destroyed revenue and consequently shareholder value in the short term for the sake of a long-term ambition to be an open network or a public good. At least it's hard to imagine a company that could get away with it for long. Private markets, on the other hand, theoretically, have more room to optimize for a different set of priorities. Now, I'm very sympathetic to the discomfort with the seeming contradiction of, on the one hand, wanting a platform to be a beacon for free and open speech for the sake of democracy, while on the other cheering on the mechanism for the delivery of that goal being a dictator,

Starting point is 00:16:12 which is a dramatic term, but in the context of a private 100% owner with total decision-making authority, sort of reasonable to apply here. I would say, in fact, that this is my default emotional, intellectual, and gut-level position. Hasu yesterday tweeted, genuinely curious, if you don't see Elon buying Twitter as dystopian, why are you even in crypto? Is authoritarian is okay as long as the right guy is in charge? It actually provoked some of the best conversation I've seen on Twitter. I'm also sympathetic to the idea that if the function of a Twitter-like platform is really bigger than a business, that it has an important or even key role in the discourse of civil society and global social life, that in an ideal world it would be

Starting point is 00:16:51 reimagined from the ground up with a totally different thinking about business model, ownership structure, etc. I would love for a different type of network with a Satoshi-like pseudo-anonymous founder who fades into the background to supersede the networks that we have today. But even the people who are speaking this goal, Chris Dixon of Andresen Horowitz writes, core internet services shouldn't be owned by individuals or companies. They should be owned by communities, as early internet protocols were. Even those voices are complicated.

Starting point is 00:17:20 All of this innovation is VC-funded because it needs to be, and the point is that everything comes with complications. But still, I don't even think that's the hard part about trying to reimagine an alternative that comes in from the outside. I have a really hard time believing that a new social network could win today simply by offering a different set of governing principles. It feels to me instead like the only opportunity is in the product itself. People adopt new networks because they offer a singular new type of content format that they end up discovering they love and wanted in their life, even if they

Starting point is 00:17:54 couldn't have articulated before that they needed it. Look at all the huge networks and they're awesome variation on that theme. Facebook, a real-life social graph of people you actually know. The content is your in-real-life world brought online. Instagram, mobile photos that capture your life for the aspiration of your life. Snapchat, ephemeral media that doesn't require you to commit to having it around forever. Reddit, asynchronous discussion boards. And the latest contender, TikTok. I would argue that TikTok in some ways starts as a mass meme participation platform as a way to pull people in. But then, the algorithm's true power

Starting point is 00:18:28 is directing them to extraordinarily niche affinity communities, rare book talk, Lord of the Rings talk. You name it, there is a TikTok for it, and the algorithm routes you there incredibly quickly. My point is that each of these have a different type of content, and it is the content, what the product actually does and what the product actually serves up, that gets people to try it and add it to their daily rotation of attention.

Starting point is 00:18:52 It seems unlikely that a Web3 version can dethrone any of these competing on terms of just being a better-run X. It seems much more possible to me that the next company that discovers a fundamental type of social content that people love builds from Web3 principles of user-owned networks from the beginning. But that's almost separable from the question of the content and the product that would get users to care in the first place. In this landscape, Twitter is the default synchronous real-time discussion network. Other channels are, yes, used for the dissemination of information, but nothing like Twitter. There have been a half-dozen or more Twitter alternatives that have come up over the years, but none of them have even gotten close to critical mass.

Starting point is 00:19:34 Is it possible then that having a principled, deep-pocketed singular owner who is willing to take a massive financial hit during some transition period is the best path forward to seeing a Twitter-like real-time synchronous network that more closely resembles what people actually want? In other words, that a benevolent business dictator who can make decisions that might be short-term financially painful to address the real underlying issues of the network, without forcing a mass shift in behavior to some other network, is the best possible way for the real-time discussion network that we actually want to emerge? Is there even the outside possibility that this

Starting point is 00:20:11 becomes some truly quasi-philanthropic thing, where Elon allows Twitter to become an open version of itself without a real owner, or at least, as Vendekesh put above a real exit option to a different version of Twitter itself. To the extent that Elon is serious about the high-minded ideas and believes that this is more important than just a corporation or a bottom line, could he actually create something that is fundamentally different and more open from within this framework? How far would he be willing to go in terms of a financial hit if it meant the platform succeeded on these principles? In short, if advertisers abandoned in Twitter en masse because of changes he was making, that reduced engagement in the short term

Starting point is 00:20:52 for the sake of better engagement in the long term, for how long would he be able to stand that financial challenge? I do think that the role of these platforms in society is bigger than just traditional businesses and requires a new perception, but that is very difficult to impose upon them in retrospect given the competing considerations of real business need. To get radical change in the context of an existing corporation with mass network effects then, it might require something this extreme in terms of decision-making concentration. Of course, all of this is destined to bring up a host of uncomfortable questions for society. Ryan Cooper of the prospect writes, no idea what Elon is going to do with this thing, but it is pretty alarming that one dude can spend the GDP of Botswana and buy up a

Starting point is 00:21:36 central global artery of communications on a random whim. Indeed, I think this is going to be a singular point as it relates to the discussion of wealth and power of billionaires in our society going forward. And even for those who support this, and even in the circumstance that Elon does the most amazing version of it, what are the chances that will still be nervous that this is something that a small number of people in the world can do? What if it had been dark Elon instead who tore society to pieces using this as a channel? In short, we don't know the answers to this, but we are now participants in the world's biggest not only free speech experiment, but business experiment, governance experiment, public commons experiment, wealth experiment. If you have a Twitter account right now,

Starting point is 00:22:20 you are a part of it. This conversation is even more interesting to be having on this particular day because it was this particular day 11 years ago that Satoshi, the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin, made their last comments and disappeared. The absence of a founder in the Bitcoin network is one of the most unique and singular things about it. The shadow of Satoshi's ghost, or rather the lack of that shadow on the decision-making of participants in the Bitcoin network, makes it fairly unique among any modern phenomenon. For a while, people were joking, or at least half-joking, that maybe Elon himself was Satoshi. Over the next few years, we're going to be able to find out just how close they actually are. For now, I want to say thanks again to my sponsors, nexus.io, Arculus and FtX, and FTCX.

Starting point is 00:23:05 And thanks to you guys for listening. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace. Hey, Breakdown listeners, come join CoinDesk's Consensus 2020, the festival for the decentralized world this June 9th through the 12th in Austin, Texas. This is the only festival showcasing and celebrating all sides of blockchain, crypto ecosystems, Web 3, and the Metaverse, and is designed for crypto newbies, investors, entrepreneurs, developers, and creators.

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The Breakdown - The World's Biggest ‘Free Speech’ Experiment Has Begun

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