Elon, Kanye, and the Future of Content Moderation

Where will the lines be drawn?

So Elon officially buys Twitter and half the world groans while the other half rejoices. It is very interesting to hear some of the anti-Elon rhetoric coming from the progressive Left. For all the work he has done on climate change it seems weird to turn against him on free speech. Vice versa for the conservative Right, they are not necessarily fans of what he’s done with EVs, but now are lining up to give him daps on the assumption that he is going to reinstate Trump on Twitter.

Kanye, and whatever mental health challenges he is going through, seems to be playing martyr and testing the strength of cancel culture vs the sheer magnitude of his fame. He buys the popular right wing/free speech social media outlet Parler, then immediately goes on a tirade of the most cancellable takes of all time. Seemingly he is gearing up for a 2024 Presidential run, conspicuously out of the Trump playbook. I actually predicted a Trump/Kanye ticket for 2020 way before he through his own hat in the ring, and I am not sure that is too far-fetched for 2024 (assuming the two egos could coexist on the same stage without imploding).

All of this is tangential to the changing of the political axis I described in a previous article. We are seeing this shift from Left vs Right to Top vs Bottom before our very eyes.

Speaking of that article and the gif I created for it, I was shocked to see Balaji reference and share it on the Lex Fridman Podcast last week. The mammoth 8 hour podcast (which should have gone down as one of the greatest pod episodes of all time, but was subsequently overshadowed by his interview with Kanye, very much in TaylorSwift/VMA fashion) was an excellent dissertation on how Crypto fixes many parts of the world, and if you were die-hard enough to make it to the 6 hour 40 minute mark, you can see them pause and acknowledge my silly artwork for a moment. Clearly I need to scale back my writing and concentrate on making more gifs..

Elon, notoriously non-political although he has donated and voted majority Democratic in the past, has a clear Libertarian streak. Beefing with California legislature over Covid lockdowns prompted him to take his billions of dollars of business to Texas. Now, with Twitter fully under his control, he gets to play content moderator in the public town square. As Zuckerberg as stated in the past, this is not an easy job. Lambasted by the Left for allowing the Cambridge Analytica leak and Russian interference in 2016, he was then lambasted by the Right for choosing to dampen the virality of the Hunter Biden laptop stories in 2020. No one knows how impactful either one of those stories were (or would have been) on the election, but it goes to show that the combat of misinformation is not an easy task. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The only correct answer for how to combat misinformation is with more speech, not less. This is the likely stance that the new Twitter is going to take, by allowing anything local governments deems legal, as simple as that. As Elon has stated, if people want certain things censored (that are legally permitted), they can petition their local government to get laws enacted, but it should not be the role of a private organization to decide what is real or fake news. People can also be in charge of their own algorithms, cranking up or down the echo-chamber-ism of their personal content diet. This is good, and forces clear legislation to be crafted around a very important topic, rather than leaving it up to subjectivity, or worse, external pressure. If you are second guessing this assertion and thinking that we do in fact need more censorship on social media, you are probably leaning a little bit Authoritarian on the Top vs Bottom spectrum. That’s totally fine, up until the point where your Party (which ever side it is) is no longer in charge anymore (which means you will probably be flipping your perspective every 4 years).

Kanye, and what he decides to publish on Parler, will almost assuredly be more aggressive than what Twitter allows, if his recent interviews are any indication. I can see a near future where Elon has no choice but to legally censor Kanye, who in turn flees to his own platform. The First Amendment is going to be put to the test, and definitions of terms like hate speech are possibly going to be the subject to litigation. Kanye seems to be crossing the proverbial line of “what do I have to say to get my money taken away”, precisely to see where that line is. Maybe that’s a cynical take, maybe he is just filled with hatred and having a mental breakdown.. or maybe one begets the other.

Now let’s tie this all back to Crypto/Web3, and the Top vs Bottom debate. Crypto skeptics are annoyingly correct in that there are no real use cases for Cryptocurrency at the moment (except as a store of value which has been made comical due to pumps of excess liquidity from the equities market). However, as I have said before, there are only two main reasons for requiring a blockchain for something: immutability (trust), and censorship resistance (privacy). Despite the fact that 99.9% of the world agrees that what Kanye said is hurtful to society, he was indeed stripped of income, as well as his banking partnership with JP Morgan. This is an extreme example, but an example nonetheless of society blocking a person from their financial freedom. And because money is still speech, this creates interesting political dynamics.

Let me be perfectly clear, I am in no way co-signing anything that Kanye said, nor have I actually listened to any of it. But imagine a world with a 51% democracy (like we have), and you being on the wrong side of that 51%. Now imagine you say something off-color behind closed doors and it somehow leaks to the press. Now imagine that all of your income streams are cut off and you can’t get a loan because of your damaged reputation. This is the narrow use case for Crypto that is really indisputable. The blockchain, on the other hand, doesn’t care who you are and will always allow you to freely transact.

Side note - I also have a Medium page where I have exactly three articles, one of which is a TV ad I wrote for Cryptocurrency loosely related to this use case. Enjoy.

I know what you are thinking: whatever off-color comment was said must have been so outrageous that it warrants financial cancellation. Or, the government/society would never get so Authoritarian that such a thing could be possible. Or, this further illustrates the point that Crypto is only useful for criminals and extremists. All of those arguments miss the point. What is “outrageous” or “extreme” is subjective, and we have already seen instances as recently as 8 months ago with Canada freezing the bank accounts of truck drivers for refusing to comply with Vax mandates. It doesn’t matter what side of the issue you are on, there is always going to be another issue. If you are pro Vax mandate and cheering on the Canadian government, well, what about when you or someone you love gets a legal abortion (for your state) but your Federally insured bank gives you the same treatment? Not quite as chill, is it?

Like the famous Jim Barksdale quote, “there are two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling”. Same goes for maintaining a society. When power gets too centralized you must de-centralize, and when it gets too de-centralized you must centralize. It’s not a coincidence that both the political Left and Right call each other Fascists. It’s because they both have Authoritarian factions.

So does this mean that Crypto becomes a cause for only the Bottom Right? And that Crypto culture (which was sort of born out of this very white alt brand of Libertarianism) is going to be dominated by hate speech spewing radical Q-anon conspiracy theorists? No, but I am telling you right now that it is going to be portrayed as such in at least half of the Media. That is, until the Bottom Left can make it’s Crypto use case for wealth redistribution. Two weeks ago, I explored whether Web3 is Socialist or Capitalist, specifically for this reason: it’s both and it’s inconsequential. Healthy, objective discussions can be had on the economic spectrum and it’s infinite layers of complexity. These discussions, when powered by Crypto, unlock new and interesting use cases that the Bottom Left can appreciate. If all 250M eligible voters in America put $5 into a DAO, they would have $1.25B which is roughly the amount that Mike Bloomberg spent on his 2020 campaign. They could create a smart contract that does some sort of ranked choice voting that elevates perhaps a Centrist candidate that might not have the personal wealth required to run for office, and back them. You can democratize even further, like when 1B Indians and 1.5B Africans come online over the next few decades. Even a few pennies per person affords massive bargaining power on a global scale. What if Elon decides Twitter should be an open protocol, not a company, (like Jack Dorsey secretly admitted it should have been and Elon agreed with) and burns his $44B acquisition as a gift to society? Unlikely, but not impossible.

Lots of legislation is going to need to be written about Crypto, because as interesting types of capital formation occur, and that money becomes speech, there is going to be conflict with existing laws (like campaign finance regulations). But right now, as midterm elections pass, and the race for 2024 starts to heat up, you can expect speech (and the control of it) to be front and center with Elon and Kanye, just how they like it .