Musk’s Twitter legal battle spotlights platform’s ‘messy’ infrastructure, tech expert says
Free speech and social media moderation a 'complicated' situation, Jessica Melugin argues
Musk’s legal battle with Twitter spotlights platform’s ‘messy’ infrastructure: Tech expert
CEI Director for the Center for Technology and Innovation Jessica Melugin analyzes how social media and its relation to free speech has become an ongoing problem on ‘Mornings with Maria.’
During an interview on "Mornings with Maria," Friday, Competitive Enterprise Institute's Jessica Melugin weighs in on a judge ordering Twitter to release a subset of data on "fake" accounts to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's lawyers following the tech leader's relinquished $44 billion deal to purchase the platform.
JESSICA MELUGIN: What's going on with social media is that it's very complicated, and it's very complex to overlap this technology with sort of our core American values. Right. We know that we're for free speech in this country. How does that work when it's public entities pressuring private platforms, right? Things get tricky, things get complicated when the White House pressures a certain kind of content moderation for COVID-19 information. We instinctively know that that is icky and that's not something that should be happening.
Elon Musk's Twitter profile displayed on a screen ((Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) / Getty Images)
The government shouldn't be pushing people around with what kind of speech can be carried on their own private property. When it happens on the international stage, and this seems to be, we don't know for sure, perhaps U.S. military propaganda, a pro-Western message that's being delivered out in the Middle East, in Russian-speaking Central Asia. Maybe we as a country feel different about that. Maybe we want our interest broadcast like that. We don't know the answers to all of these questions yet. But what we have to remember is social media is really powerful, but it's also relatively new, and we're kind of feeling our way through these issues. That's going to be messy for a while, like most technologies are at the beginning.
JUDGE ORDERS MORE DOCUMENT PRODUCTION IN MUSK-TWITTER SUIT
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE:
US government should not be controlling speech on Twitter: Tech expert
Competitive Enterprise Institute's Jessica Melugin reacts to the judge’s decision to order Twitter to issue a subset of data in response to Elon Musk’s legal battle on ‘Mornings with Maria.’