No, Elon Musk, Your $8 Twitter Plan Won’t Stop Hate Speech
Yesterday Elon Musk spoke in a Twitter Space aimed at mollifying nervous advertisers about his plans for verification on the platform he recently acquired. The hourlong chat between Musk and Robin Wheeler from Twitter’s ad team was wide-ranging — he floated plans for some sort of payment system and explained why car advertisers shouldn’t be worried.
Largely, he focused on explaining his vision for an $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription and its verification system. “I’m struggling with the question of how do you deal with millions of bots and troll farms, including malicious state actors,” the Chief Twit said.
Wheeler asked him about content moderation and brand safety — specifically hate speech (advertisers, for good reason, don’t want their ads running next to hate speech). Musk said that this would be solved by the $8 paywall. “The propensity of someone to engage in hate speech if they’ve paid $8 and are risking their account,” Musk said. “Think about it… how much hate speech do you encounter if you’re at a party, or at an event?”
Unfortunately, Musk is dead wrong.
He is falling for an old fallacy that if people use their real names online, they won’t say terrible things. Anyone who has ever observed boomers in a local Buy Nothing Facebook group knows that people have no problem saying nasty things under their real names.
Musk’s plan also flies in the face of several academic studies on online behavior. A well-known 2016 study from the University of Zurich showed that using real names actually makes people more likely to post hateful and aggressive comments. One reason for this is that people who were trolling sensed the approval of their peers.
Making people use real names has also been shown to fail at scale. In 2007, in an effort to reduce cyberbullying, South Korea passed a law requiring real names for commenters on large websites. The law was scrapped by 2012, in part because a study showed it only reduced aggressive comments by less than 1%.
Yesterday Elon Musk spoke in a Twitter Space aimed at mollifying nervous advertisers about his plans for verification on the platform he recently acquired. The hourlong chat between Musk and Robin Wheeler from Twitter’s ad team was wide-ranging — he floated plans for some sort of payment system and explained…
