I hope Elon is serious about fairness, honesty and accountability when it comes to his approach for providing free speech on Twitter. I'm not optimistic about any single person getting to decide what is and is not free speech but I am willing to withhold judgment (while hoping his takeover can be prevented or at least delayed until an alternative that is not just a play toy for a whimsical billionaire can be established).
If Elon is serious, I have a suggestion that might help.
Each person on Twitter should have a "truth rating" attached to their name. Easily identifiable for all to see.
This could be thought of much like a credit rating. Those with better truth ratings would be entitled to greater privileges and less supervision of their posts. Much like those with higher credit ratings have greater access to benefits and freedoms in our society and those with lower ratings endure greater restrictions.
Any person on Twitter seeing a Tweet from someone that they know to be inaccurate could use a "report" mechanism to call the claim into question.
A significant number of these "reports" on a given Tweet would cause it to automatically be submitted to an independent and unbiased oversight committee. These committees could be made up of Twitter members with truth ratings (to use a credit rating scale) of 750 or better, who volunteer to serve on these committees for some benefit or other Elon will inevitably introduce in order to monetize Twitter.
The idea is to have honest and fair Twitter users being the ones who are submitting "reports" and making "judgments" on questionable Tweets.
Those users who insist upon Tweeting lies will find themselves with a pretty low truth rating so anyone reading their tweet will know immediately that the likelihood of their Tweet being reliable information is low. Those Tweets determined to be inaccurate would also be temporarily blocked until fixed by the user that issued the Tweet or deleted if they are unwilling to do so.
Users who insist upon Tweeting harmful lies would fall into the lower echelons of "truth rating" which would automatically cause the suspension of their account.
Users interested in improving their "truth rating" would do so by acknowledging where the information they provided was inaccurate and self correcting their posts.
Those who are consistently unwilling to acknowledge inaccuracy or lies can sit and spin in "account suspension limbo".
Anyone who serves on a committee to insure accuracy and truthfulness would suffer auto suspension of their account and a substantial loss to their "truth rating" if they participated in a "conspiracy" to reinstate inaccurate or untruthful Tweets.
Over-committees could be formed eventually to more or less mimic our appellate court system but those who serve would consist of those with earned and reliable truth ratings in the highest echelons of truthfulness.
There is no need to "reinvent the wheel" here. The methodology the "credit bureaus" use in order to lower or raise credit ratings could be roughly paralleled in order to determine the difficulty / ease of raising one's truth rating.
The idea is to have a "town square" forum for discussion of ideas and opinions without the problems of outright falsehood and deception we have struggled with. Having a common truth, a common reality is what we are lacking now. Free speech and freedom to lie should not be obfuscated. One is invaluable the other is destroying us.
It's important to note the difference between bias and lies. Too often there is a false equivalent drawn between the two. Calling Trump a twice impeached disgraced ex President is biased. Calling Trump the winner of our last Presidential election is a lie. The latter would be grounds for a "report". The prior is just bias. If you want to create a separate "bias rating" I expect you could use a similar idea to do that as well.
Elon, if you execute this successfully you could sell it to Facebook hehe. They need it over there pretty desperately.
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