“People consider it almost as a kind of public service,” warns a specialist

“The criticisms that we make of Twitter are criticisms that can be made of almost any platform,” explained Friday October 27 on franceinfo Jean-Baptiste Soufron, lawyer at the Paris bar and former secretary general of the National Digital Council, while a collective calls this Friday for a day without tweeting on X (ex-Twitter), one year after Elon Musk took control of the social network. “We see that this network is massively used by people for information and has an influence that goes well beyond its number of users”alerted this specialist.

A year ago, on October 27, 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. A collective calls for “a day without Twitter” to denounce “the many problems” which have “emerged”, such as the dissemination of false information. Do you agree with this observation?

Jean-Baptiste Soufron: In one year, it’s difficult to say that the network has changed a lot. And above all, we can have the impression that in reality, the criticisms that we make of Twitter, or even directly of Elon Musk, are in fact criticisms that can more generally be made of almost all other platforms. But here, Elon Musk serves as a bit of a better example for us to say what is going wrong, what is not going well and what should be changed. And what is interesting in this approach, by saying that we are going to have a sort of Twitter strike or a strike of X, is that we can see that this network is massively used by people to get information and has an influence that goes far beyond its number of users, just 368 million worldwide. Indeed, people use it every day and, in reality, sometimes consider it almost as a kind of public service, except that here, we have a public service which is run by a private company.

Is Twitter not the tree that hides the forest?

Let’s say that Elon Musk’s personality is useful in that he is so involved in direct interaction that when we talk, for example, about fake news and the proliferation of this fake news, he himself relays messages from denialist accounts. Unlike other internet information oligopoly groups like Meta or Google, Elon Musk is radical. Facebook and Google have also made layoffs, but on Twitter’s side, almost 80% of the teams have been laid off. And Elon Musk announced almost publicly that the fight against fake news was not something that interested him and that he wanted to promote on his network. He was slapped on the wrist by the European Union because everyone was using the network to promote false information. And on this, he doesn’t really provide an answer.

Is it up to European leaders, European companies to build their alternative?

On the one hand, yes, but alternatives, there are already some that exist with private alternatives like “Blue Sky” or “Threads”, the application which was launched by Méta (ex-Facebook) but also others more free and open like Mastodon. Today you already have tools that make it possible to operate. The whole problem is that Twitter is 20 years old and so in 20 years, people have developed habits. It’s difficult to come out of it.

“You have an inertia which favors this kind of attachment to this service, which remains a private service on which we have very little democratic impact today.”

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, lawyer and former secretary general of the National Digital Council

at franceinfo

However, we see many political actors, the President of the Republic in the lead, but also sometimes prefectures, who communicate firstly on Twitter?

It is true that, for public officials, we can regret that they primarily and predominantly use Twitter as a form of dissemination channel, while others exist, which also work very well. There is, if you like, a kind of laziness, that is to say that if we are critical and we consider that the quality of the information is too important, there is a moment when we can also refrain from communicating.