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Fake news, harassment, and misinformation have always existed, but with the outbreak of social media, they gained larger dimensions. Now, we are wondering how the internet impacts our decisions, good coexistence as a society, and social behaviors. The billionaire owner of Tesla, Elon Musk, brought this topic to the table by throwing a poll on his Twitter account questioning the platform about its promise regarding freedom of speech. Right after doing this, this week, he bought nearly 10% of Twitter shares. Curious, isn’t it? The results of that poll were even more interesting. The majority of the results, 70%, didn’t think that Twitter rightly adheres to the principle of freedom of speech.
Anyways, it’s a biased poll since it was aimed at Musk’s followers – it’s not scientific-based at all. During this week, Musk also made more polemic tweets saying that he would work to “make significant improvements to Twitter”, and made another poll, now asking if his Whatsapp Number followers wanted an edit button. Quickly, Twitter said that Musk won’t decide on product roadmaps and that the edit button was being developed long before the billionaire’s poll. The fact is that Musk has a history of complaining about Twitter’s moderation tools, although even his anti-vaccine posts and bad “jokes” involving even Hitler were not deleted by the social media platform.
For Musk, due to the moderation tools, the new CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, is compared to Joseph Stalin, for example. Blaming Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube (and even present and past generations) for preventing our free-speech is to just scratch the surface of the entire problem. Manipulation, fake news, and even censorship seem like the daily breakfast for every social media user. The big question is: who to believe? How can we learn to trust our own timeline? And how to prevent personal damage from it? In this article, we will discuss the mysteries about our freedom of speech and social media in modern days. And if you like to receive articles like this directly in your inbox, consider subscribing to our interactive newsletter below!
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