Could Musk’s Twitter Takeover Have a Silver Lining?

Courtney Radsch writes that Musk’s musing about wanting to increase public confidence in Twitter by opening up its “blackbox algorithm” may assuage at least some of the well-justified concerns about another Silicon Valley billionaire owning a major portion of the public sphere — and could lead to experimentation with a different type of social media logic and experience, laying the groundwork for a decentralized social network standard.

Transparency rules are a traditional way to put pressure on companies to act in the public interest and to protect consumers. Mark MacCarthy says that the era of self-regulation for social media companies is over. After years of letting digital companies manage their own systems and content moderation practices with little or no public supervision, governments around the world are throwing a regulatory net over digital companies.

“We are seeing ourselves in this,” a volunteer with the Syria Civil Defence, which issued a statement of solidarity with Ukraine, told Marie Lamensch. During Syria’s 2011 revolution, the ensuing brutal crackdown by Bashar al-Assad and, later, Russia’s intervention, members of this humanitarian group, labelled “terrorists” by the Kremlin, documented war crimes on cameras attached to their white helmets and shared the footage on social media to combat disinformation. The West failed to hold the Syrian and Russian leaders accountable for their crimes in Syria: Lamensch writes that we must not let that happen in Ukraine.

May 26 – 12:00 p.m. EDT (UTC–04:00): As digital technologies reshape markets in many profound ways, why does competition matter? How are Canada’s Competition Bureau and the Competition Act critical to the country’s economic recovery?

As Canada looks ahead to modernizing its Competition Act, join CIGI for a conversation about these and other questions. Remarks by Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell will open the hour; a moderated panel discussion will follow.

Find out more about this free event here, and stay tuned for upcoming events in the series.