Elon musk is simply making *** mess of things. Elon musk, the richest man in the world has taken control of twitter. Former president donald trump no longer banned from the platform cyber criminals are taking advantage of night will Ellen must be stepping down as twitter's ceo *** lot has changed since Elon musk took over twitter. But aside from the memes and drama layoffs and advertiser exodus, how has Elon musk's twitter affected democracy and free speech? This is clarified since mosque became owner and ceo of twitter, the company ended its covid 19 misinformation policy and disbanded its trust and safety council. He also reversed bans on former President Donald trump and representative marjorie taylor greene trump had been permanently suspended over concerns. His tweets would incite further violence. After the january 6th riot green had been barred over spreading covid misinformation. This is all part of musk's plan. As *** self proclaimed free speech. Absolutist to loosen twitter's content. Moderation Yet he's come under fire for suspending journalists who report on him and then there was his pay for verification system. Chaos ensued after musk rolled out Twitter blue for $8 per month subscribers of the service get *** blue checkmark, *** symbol that had been previously used to indicate notable and authentic accounts. Now the checkmark may mean two different things. Users took advantage of that ambiguity and started to impersonate corporate brands and public figures. After the rollout the Washington post proved how faulty the system was by Impersonating massachusetts. Senator Ed Markey which prompted the politician to call and musk to fix his companies or congress will he is not going to escape the kind of scrutiny necessary to make sure that we don't have *** further increase acceleration of the of the hate speech, of the, of the misrepresentation that has been occurring over the last several years. Experts studying misinformation are concerned the weak verification system could further spread misinformation. The more difficult we make it for people to understand the truth, we're going to have difficulty making accurate policy decisions. It can have implications for how our democratic system works. So why should we care about these changes? Because twitter has grown to play *** huge role in our society. Your local leaders may use twitter to alert the community of emergency situations or spread word of *** food drive around the world. Twitter has given people *** voice in their governments to speak on issues, organize around causes and hold leaders accountable and *** large percentage of the public gets their political information from social media. So, so how they perform this function of informing the public about the issues of the day. That's *** crucial factor in *** healthy and legitimate system of political governance. And when the power of social media is taken advantage of it could spread harmful misinformation and even potentially incite violence. Leaders on both the left and right want to hold the social media companies accountable, According to Politico, states introduced or passed bills aimed at Big Tech in 2022. However, federal courts have blocked two laws from taking effect on the federal level. The Supreme Court is actually looking at *** case challenging Section 2 30 *** law that shields social media platforms from being sued for their users post. President joe biden has also called for getting rid of this law, calling on Congress to get rid of special immunity for social media companies and impose much stronger transparency requirements on all of them. Mark McCarthy says transparency is essential to effectively regulate social media. They have to provide due process to users when they remove or downgrade something, they have to tell the users about it. They have to provide *** mechanism for users to complain and say you got it wrong. Uh They should be required to do assessment studies on the risks to public health and the political process from the material on their system. That's the kind of transparency requirement. And then perhaps most effective of all they would have to provide access to researchers vetted researchers to conduct independent studies of what's going on. He suggests the US can model after the use Digital services Act where european governments now have the power to ask web platforms like twitter to remove any content that promotes terrorism, hate speech and more and and it's it's essentially transparency uh set of transparency requirements. It's got user disclosures, it's got due process, it's got risk assessments, it's got access to information for researchers. Uh So that's *** pretty good model for for *** regulatory structure and regulating Big Tech will continue to be an ongoing process. It's not as though you're going to get to *** point where we say now we fixed it and we're done, We can relax. They have to continue to modify, upgrade and improve their systems.