每天一篇经济学人 | Social media 社交媒体（2022年第3...

Sweeping statements about the future of humanity do not usually feature in discussions about leveraged buy-outs. But Elon Musk has never felt bound by convention. Asked about his plans to buy Twitter, a social media, and take it private-which were approved by the firm's board on April 25th-he went straight for the big idea. "My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilisation. I don't care about the economics at all."

有关杠杆收购的讨论中一般不会出现关于人类未来的宏大叙事。但埃隆·马斯克(Elon Musk)从不受传统束缚。在被问到收购社交媒体推特并将其私有化（4月25日推特董事会已同意）的计划时，马斯克直接抛出了一个宏伟理念。“我的强烈直觉是，一个最受信任和广泛包容的公共平台对文明的未来极其重要。我根本就不在乎经济效益。”

Compared with its rivals-Facebook, Instagram and TikTok-Twitter is a minnow. But the deal matters. One reason is that Twitter's size belies its importance. As a haunt of politicians, pundits and wonks, it does much to set the political weather-a digital"public square", as Mr Musk put it.

与Facebook、Instagram和TikTok等对手相比，推特毫不起眼。但这次交易却事关重大。原因之一是推特的小体量掩盖了其重要性。作为政客、专家和策士的常驻平台，推特在确立政治风向方面发挥着重大作用，正如马斯克所说，推特是一个数字“公共广场”。

Another is that Mr Musk made his name and his fortune by upending industries. This time, he will be grappling with a knotty problem of keen interest to governments around the world-how to regulate speech online. Most prescribe ever more rules. But Mr Musk wants to go the other way, removing restrictions instead of imposing new ones. The operations of other big social networks will be watching the experiment with interest.

原因之二是，马斯克正是靠颠覆产业扬名立万、发家致富。这一次，他要对付一个世界各国政府都非常关注的棘手问题——如何监管网络言论。大多数政府都选择制定更多法规，而马斯克则反其道而行，不是要施加新限制，而是要取消限制。其他大型社交网络公司将饶有兴致地关注他的这次尝试。

At first blush, Mr Musk-best known for electric cars and reusable rockets-seems an unlikely social-media mogul. But a closer look suggests his acquisition of Twitter fits his approach to business. Mr Musk, a passionate engineer, likes to take poorly performing technologies and improve them. Tesla tore up the car industry's rule book by replacing petrol with electricity, ditching dealerships and treating cars as computers. SpaceX proved that a hungry, move-fast-and-break-things startup run on a relative shoestring could outperform aerospace giants grown cautious and fat on the back of generous government contracts. Both firms were dismissed by bigger incumbents-until one day they weren't.

乍一看，以电动汽车和可重复使用火箭而最为人所知的马斯克看起来不太像个社交媒体巨头，但仔细考察后发现，收购推特符合其经商之道。马斯克是一个充满热情的工程师，乐于对性能欠佳的技术进行改良。特斯拉以电力代替石油，放弃经销商模式，将汽车电脑化，打破了整个汽车行业的规则。SpaceX则证明了，一家有野心、能快速突破、破旧立新的初创公司，仅靠相对较少的运营资金，也能超越航空业巨头，这些巨头靠着巨额政府合同愈加财大气粗，却也愈加谨小慎微。特斯拉和SpaceX都曾受到各自行业内大型公司的轻视——直到有一天，它们变得不可忽视。

All that engineering and disruption is animated by Mr Musk's own, sometimes idiosyncratic conception of the social good. Tesla's purpose is to prod the world more quickly towards a carbon-free economy(a goal vindicated by the speed at which other carmakers are now pivoting to electric vehicles). SpaceX's ambition is so grandiose some commentators struggle to believe that Mr Musk is sincere: to establish a human presence on Mars, something that, were a catastrophe to befall Earth, might one day prove to have been an insurance policy for civilisation.

马斯克独有的、有时显得标新立异的关于社会公益的概念，是所有这些工程设计和颠覆背后的驱动力。特斯拉旨在促使全球更快向无碳经济转型（其他汽车制造商正快速转向电动汽车制造，证实了这一目标）。SpaceX 目标恢宏远大，一些评论家很难相信马斯克的意图真诚：实现人类定居火星。如果哪天灾难降临地球，这一计划将成为人类文明的“人寿保险”。

Assume that Mr Musk really is ready to spend billions of dollars of his own money to secure the "future of civilisation"(though he has a break clause should he get cold feet). The question is whether his vision of free speech on Twitter is sensible.

假设马斯克真的愿意自掏腰包，花费数十亿美元确保“文明的未来”安全无虞（虽然如果他临阵退缩，还可以利用中断条款全身而退）。问题是他对推特言论自由的愿景是否合理。

Twitter fits the pattern of Tesla and SpaceX, offering Mr Musk another complex engineering system to tinker with, and a grand reason for doing so. Social media deploy algorithms to highlight "engaging"content, using a thicket of rules that try to mitigate the worst side-effects, the better to sell users to advertisers. It is a business model full of inconsistencies and unexamined trade-offs that looks ripe for disruption. That Mr Musk wants to be its agent is perhaps no surprise, for he cut his entrepreneurial teeth in the 1990s, when techno-libertarianism and anti-censorship were the internet's animating ideas.

推特符合特斯拉和SpaceX的模式，向马斯克提供了另一个需要修理的复杂工程系统，以及这么做的堂皇理由。社交媒体利用多项规则减轻最恶劣的负面影响，调用算法以凸显“引人眼球的”内容，以便更好地把客户推销给广告商。这一商业模式充满了自相矛盾、未经审视的折中取舍，极易出现混乱。马斯克首次创业是在1990年代，当时互联网的科技自由意志主义和反审查理念非常活跃，有鉴于此，他欲成为推特的代理人也许并不奇怪。

The fact that Mr Musk is a billionaire should not disqualify him from owning an important media firm. He has already set out some ideas for Twitter, many of them cautious and sensible. The resulting fuss shows how illiberral much online opinion has become. He wants fewer outright bans and more temporary suspensions. Users should prove they are not bots. When in doubt, err on the side of leaving tweets up, not taking them down.

马斯克亿万富翁的身份，不应剥夺其拥有一家重要媒体公司的资格。关于推特，他已经提出了一些想法，其中很多审慎且合理。由此引发的风波则显示出大部分网络观点已变得何等反自由。马斯克希望：推特能少一些永久封禁，多一些暂时禁言；用户应证明自己不是机器人；如有疑问，宁可保留推文，也不要直接删除。

More significant, he thinks the cogs and ratchets of Twitter's recommendation algorithm, which decides which tweets a user sees, should be public. Researchers could examine it; other programmes could tweak it. A version less prone to pushing "engaging" content-which, in practice, often means tweets that are enraging, controversial or plain daft-could lower the temperature of the entire platform, making the job of moderation easier and possibly leading to debate that s more thoughtful. Or perhaps Twitter could become an open platform, where different users may choose one of many different third-party algorithms-or none at all-according to their taste. Content moderation is the messy product of political and social pressures. It will be fascinating to see how easily it succumbs to engineering.

更重要的是，他认为应将推特的推荐算法（该算法决定用户能看到什么样的推文内容）进行公开。研究者可对其进行审验；其他程序可以对其进行修改。如果有一个算法版本，不太倾向于推送“引人眼球的”内容（实际中，”引人眼球“往往意味着愤怒、有争议或愚蠢的推文），则有可能使整个平台氛围冷静下来，内容节制也就更容易实现，而且还有可能引导论争变得更为全面深刻。也许推特可以成为一个开源平台，不同用户可根据个人好恶，从很多第三方算法中择一而用，或者不选择任何算法。内容节制是政治和社会压力的糟糕产物。它是否轻易屈从于工程改造，我们满怀期盼拭目以待。

Mr Musk will not have an entirely free hand. Australia, Britain, the EU and India, have all been working on tech-regulation. Thierry Breton, a senior EU official, noted that "It's not [Mr Musk's] rules that will apply here." Mr Musk's other investors are nervous. The more time he devotes to Twitter, the less he will have for his other ventures. Shares in Tesla fell by 12% after news of the Twitter deal.

澳大利亚、英国、欧盟和印度都在推进科技监管，马斯克不可能信马由缰。欧盟高级官员蒂埃里·布雷顿(Thierry Breton)指出：“（马斯克的）规则在这儿不适用。”马斯克的其他投资者则忧心忡忡。他花在推特上的时间越多，投入其他公司的时间就会越少。达成收购推特协议的消息传出后，特斯拉股价大跌12%。

Mr Musk's personality poses a big risk. He is clever, driven and ferociously hard-working. He can also be puerile and vindictive, traits on display in 2018 when he accused a British cave rescue expert, with no evidence, of being a "pedo guy". Such outbursts are one thing coming from a Twitter user with a big following. But when he is the owner, they will raise questions about whether he will be able to resist the temptation to exploit his new position to pursue his own obsessions and vendettas.

马斯克本人的性格问题，带来了很大的风险。他聪明，有干劲，是个超级工作狂。同时他也非常幼稚，还爱记仇。2018年，马斯克在毫无证据的情况下诋毁一名英国洞穴救援专家为“恋童癖”，充分显示了他的这些性格缺点。一个有大批追随者的推特用户信口开河是一回事，但当他成为推特拥有者时，这么做会引出一些质疑，即他是否能抵御诱惑不利用这一新的身份追求个人喜好或者寻私仇呢。

The bird and the oak tree

This newspaper shares Mr Musk's free-speech convictions. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Experts are sometimes wrong and blowhards sometimes right. Even in the internet age, the best response to a bad argument is a better one. Moderation on many platforms has become heavy-handed and arbitrarily enforced. If Mr Musk's talent for shaking up industries can help cut the Gordian knot of online speech, everyone will benefit.

本刊赞同马斯克对自由言论的信念。没有人能垄断智慧。专家有时也会出错，满嘴跑火车的人有时却是对的。即使在网络时代，面对一个糟糕的观点，最好的回应是给出一个更好的论述。很多平台在内容节制上过于严厉，而执行上又存在很大的随意性。如果马斯克能发挥颠覆产业的天赋，协助解开言论自由的死结，大家都会从中受益。

But we are also keen on another liberal principle, that institutions should be bigger than the person running them. Mr Musk can set new rules, but he should be seen to play no role in enforcing them. If he really wants to convince users that he will be an impartial guardian of his "digital public square", he could implement his reforms-and then freeze his own account.

但我们也坚持另一项自由原则：机构应比经营机构的个人更重要。马斯克可以制定新规则，但他也应保证不参与规则的执行。如果马斯克真的想要让用户们相信，他将大公无私地守护这一“数字公共广场“，就该改革，然后冻结自己的推特账户。