Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
- gpeavler1
- Jun 14, 2024
- 2 min read
Is a Latin phrase oft repeated by one Elon Musk, owner of what is now called X, and is commonly translated as "The voice of the people is the voice of God.".
Though most famously written by Musk during his poll to reinstate Donald Trump's X account, the quote also serves as a summation of Musk's stated motivations and goals for his platform and his stated philosophy of free speech on X. X is also a uniquely interesting platform to use in a comparison of the way news is presented on different social media platforms because it is able to be compared with itself, specifically the between pre and post Musk ownership, for convenience referred to as Twitter and X respectively.
For this post, I would like to zoom into one area that I believe captures these differences in microcosm, which is Twitter's tweet annotations and X's community notes (originally called 'Birdwatch'). Both sought to provide context for tweets or posts that could be misinterpreted or just plain false. Twitter's annotations were top-down moderation, written and stapled to tweets by staff members that users were meant to trust as fact. Pros of this model were that it alleged to be more reliable, yet the cons were that the "truth-tellers" and their motivations were completely unknown, and could be thought to be censoring or twisting news inconvenient to their morals.
While no human system of content contextualization can be fully unbiased or escape the cons listed above, X's model of community notes seeks to be at least more democratic. ""Our goal is to build Birdwatch in the open, and have it shaped by the Twitter community,” [Keith] Coleman wrote." Instead of website staff providing the context, community notes are written by the userbase and voted on by said userbase as to whether or not they should be included with the post. Twitter sought to use its authority to curate the news users saw, where X seeks to grant that authority to its users. [1 image, 1 link, 1 quotation, 332 words.]
