In March 2021, a Turkish court ordered the news site Diken to remove a critical story about an ally of the country’s president, Recep Tayip Erdogan. Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish lawyer and digital rights activist, posted a tweet urging his followers to read the story before the decision went into effect. Then the court ruled that his tweet also needed to be removed. But for more than a year Twitter has defied the order, allowing the tweet to remain up.
If Elon Musk had owned Twitter then, Akdeniz might have been out of luck. Though the SpaceX founder’s purchase of the company has been plagued by issues, it still appears that he is poised to take over the platform. Despite his insistence that he will make Twitter a haven for free speech, Musk’s vision for content moderation is to comply with local laws. “My preference is to hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates,” he tweeted on May 9. “If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed.”
In the US, which has a highly permissive definition of free speech protected by the First Amendment, Musk’s approach would force Twitter to allow all manner of content that is, as lawyers say, “awful but lawful,” including overt racism and doxing. But protections for free speech are weaker in many other countries, including Turkey, India, and Russia. A standard of only allowing what is permitted by law would result in less free speech on Twitter, not more.
In many countries, Twitter is rarely the most popular platform, but its function as a hub for activists, journalists, and politicians means “it punches above its weight in its role in shaping public discourse,” says Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation in Delhi.
Currently, Twitter does frequently comply with government requests to block or remove material, especially if it violates the company’s terms of service. But the platform also often rejects takedown requests, as it did in Akdeniz’s case. Between January and July of 2021, Twitter complied with legal demands just over 54 percent of the time, but the rate varies heavily from country to country. In Russia, where Twitter responds to only 8 percent of government takedown requests, the company refused to censor content related to the 2021 protests in support of opposition politician Alexei Navalny. This led to swift reprisal:
