An Opportunity for Twitter

How the revolution at Twitter may give them the chance to break their chains. Or not.

Like many people I’m curious about the ongoing train crash that is Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. The first part of this is the human carnage being wrought as the company is dismantled and remade which horrifies and transfixes the person in my that has built organisations. It’s fair to say I’m amazed anyone is still there. I know I wouldn’t be. A different and interesting angle is also to think about how Twitter can dig themselves out of the mess they were in when Elon Musk entered the building. This is the same mess that almost all social media companies find themselves in right now. Content moderation and taking responsibility for the safety of their users.

I’ve written before about why Freedom of Speech is Hard on the Internet and with governments around the world finally starting to legislate for the harms of social media, hate speech and disinformation on the Internet most Social Media companies find themselves in a difficult position. How do they scale their content moderation so that they are able to meet their current and future legal duties?

Let’s put some numbers on the fundamental problem at play here. How do you scale content moderation? First up start with the headline number. There are 500 million tweets a day on Twitter. That’s 200 billion a…