The Story of Twitter and the Issues of Freedom on the Internet: The Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan e-mailed to the United States

Before becoming Twitter’s CEO, owner, and “Chief Twit,” Elon Musk had often lobbed criticism at the platform for its approach to content moderation, even going so far as to target the company’s former policy chief Vijaya Gadde. But while Musk has expressed his concern about “liberal bias” on the platform, many activists, journalists, and advocates outside the US—where the majority of Twitter’s users reside—have begun to worry about how Twitter, now without a board or shareholders and led by a CEO with multiple business entanglements, will respond to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning governments that have long sought to control public opinion.

David Kaye is a former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.

According to the executive director of the Global Network Initiative, Musk’s goal to build a more than a billion person user base may affect his willingness to battle it out with foreign governments to keep content on the platform.

Although they may not represent a huge share of Twitter’s revenue stream right now, countries like Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which have very large, increasingly online populations, are all attractive markets as the company looks to grow its revenue and increase its user base, according to Pielemeier. All of those countries have had debates with social media companies. Last year, the Nigerian government ordered all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Twitter after the platform deleted a tweet from the country’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, for violating its policies. The government lifted the ban only after Twitter agreed to open an office in the country and pay local taxes.

Over the summer, when Musk was still trying to wriggle out of buying Twitter, his lawyers filed a countersuit against the company that included a grab-bag of justifications for scuttling the deal. The claims that caught my attention were the ones that his lawyers argued would put one of the largest markets in jeopardy.

Last month, Freedom House released its annual report on freedom on the internet. Allie Funk, one of the researchers who wrote the report, told me that while much of the focus has been on countries like China, which overtly restricts access to huge swaths of the internet, the real war over the future of internet freedom is being waged in what she called “swing states,” big, fragile democracies like India.

There are some laws that were introduced with good faith. Other governments are passing laws just to increase their power over speech online, and to force companies to be an extension of the state. It’s possible to make companies vulnerable to government monitoring by requiring them to house their server in the US.

Twitter had indeed sued the Indian government in July — and for good reasons. In 2021, India had created a raft of rules that gave the government much more power to order technology platforms to remove content on command, and also hold employees of tech platforms criminally liable for speech that appears on their services. Exactly the kind of laws Funk was referring to.

Musk might have been trying to escape a purchase that would be disastrous. At least so far, it has been disastrous. But it seems that this is actually what he believes. In April, he tweeted: “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want a reduction in free speech, the government will pass laws to that effect. Going beyond the law is against the will of the people.