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."

有關杠桿收購的討論中一般不會出現(xiàn)關于人類未來的宏大敘事。但埃隆·馬斯克(Elon Musk)從不受傳統(tǒng)束縛。在被問到收購社交媒體推特并將其私有化（4月25日推特董事會已同意）的計劃時，馬斯克直接拋出了一個宏偉理念。“我的強烈直覺是，一個最受信任和廣泛包容的公共平臺對文明的未來極其重要。我根本就不在乎經(jīng)濟效益。”

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.

與Facebook、Instagram和TikTok等對手相比，推特毫不起眼。但這次交易卻事關重大。原因之一是推特的小體量掩蓋了其重要性。作為政客、專家和策士的常駐平臺，推特在確立政治風向方面發(fā)揮著重大作用，正如馬斯克所說，推特是一個數(shù)字“公共廣場”。

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，馬斯克正是靠顛覆產(chǎn)業(yè)揚名立萬、發(fā)家致富。這一次，他要對付一個世界各國政府都非常關注的棘手問題——如何監(jiān)管網(wǎng)絡言論。大多數(shù)政府都選擇制定更多法規(guī)，而馬斯克則反其道而行，不是要施加新限制，而是要取消限制。其他大型社交網(wǎng)絡公司將饒有興致地關注他的這次嘗試。

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，以電動汽車和可重復使用火箭而最為人所知的馬斯克看起來不太像個社交媒體巨頭，但仔細考察后發(fā)現(xiàn)，收購推特符合其經(jīng)商之道。馬斯克是一個充滿熱情的工程師，樂于對性能欠佳的技術進行改良。特斯拉以電力代替石油，放棄經(jīng)銷商模式，將汽車電腦化，打破了整個汽車行業(yè)的規(guī)則。SpaceX則證明了，一家有野心、能快速突破、破舊立新的初創(chuàng)公司，僅靠相對較少的運營資金，也能超越航空業(yè)巨頭，這些巨頭靠著巨額政府合同愈加財大氣粗，卻也愈加謹小慎微。特斯拉和SpaceX都曾受到各自行業(yè)內大型公司的輕視——直到有一天，它們變得不可忽視。

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.

馬斯克獨有的、有時顯得標新立異的關于社會公益的概念，是所有這些工程設計和顛覆背后的驅動力。特斯拉旨在促使全球更快向無碳經(jīng)濟轉型（其他汽車制造商正快速轉向電動汽車制造，證實了這一目標）。SpaceX 目標恢宏遠大，一些評論家很難相信馬斯克的意圖真誠：實現(xiàn)人類定居火星。如果哪天災難降臨地球，這一計劃將成為人類文明的“人壽保險”。

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.

假設馬斯克真的愿意自掏腰包，花費數(shù)十億美元確?！拔拿鞯奈磥怼卑踩珶o虞（雖然如果他臨陣退縮，還可以利用中斷條款全身而退）。問題是他對推特言論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，向馬斯克提供了另一個需要修理的復雜工程系統(tǒng)，以及這么做的堂皇理由。社交媒體利用多項規(guī)則減輕最惡劣的負面影響，調用算法以凸顯“引人眼球的”內容，以便更好地把客戶推銷給廣告商。這一商業(yè)模式充滿了自相矛盾、未經(jīng)審視的折中取舍，極易出現(xiàn)混亂。馬斯克首次創(chuàng)業(yè)是在1990年代，當時互聯(lián)網(wǎng)的科技自由意志主義和反審查理念非?；钴S，有鑒于此，他欲成為推特的代理人也許并不奇怪。

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.

馬斯克億萬富翁的身份，不應剝奪其擁有一家重要媒體公司的資格。關于推特，他已經(jīng)提出了一些想法，其中很多審慎且合理。由此引發(fā)的風波則顯示出大部分網(wǎng)絡觀點已變得何等反自由。馬斯克希望：推特能少一些永久封禁，多一些暫時禁言；用戶應證明自己不是機器人；如有疑問，寧可保留推文，也不要直接刪除。

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，他認為應將推特的推薦算法（該算法決定用戶能看到什么樣的推文內容）進行公開。研究者可對其進行審驗；其他程序可以對其進行修改。如果有一個算法版本，不太傾向于推送“引人眼球的”內容（實際中，”引人眼球“往往意味著憤怒、有爭議或愚蠢的推文），則有可能使整個平臺氛圍冷靜下來，內容節(jié)制也就更容易實現(xiàn)，而且還有可能引導論爭變得更為全面深刻。也許推特可以成為一個開源平臺，不同用戶可根據(jù)個人好惡，從很多第三方算法中擇一而用，或者不選擇任何算法。內容節(jié)制是政治和社會壓力的糟糕產(chǎn)物。它是否輕易屈從于工程改造，我們滿懷期盼拭目以待。

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.

澳大利亞、英國、歐盟和印度都在推進科技監(jiān)管，馬斯克不可能信馬由韁。歐盟高級官員蒂埃里·布雷頓(Thierry Breton)指出：“（馬斯克的）規(guī)則在這兒不適用?！瘪R斯克的其他投資者則憂心忡忡。他花在推特上的時間越多，投入其他公司的時間就會越少。達成收購推特協(xié)議的消息傳出后，特斯拉股價大跌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.

馬斯克本人的性格問題，帶來了很大的風險。他聰明，有干勁，是個超級工作狂。同時他也非常幼稚，還愛記仇。2018年，馬斯克在毫無證據(jù)的情況下詆毀一名英國洞穴救援專家為“戀童癖”，充分顯示了他的這些性格缺點。一個有大批追隨者的推特用戶信口開河是一回事，但當他成為推特擁有者時，這么做會引出一些質疑，即他是否能抵御誘惑不利用這一新的身份追求個人喜好或者尋私仇呢。

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.

本刊贊同馬斯克對自由言論的信念。沒有人能壟斷智慧。專家有時也會出錯，滿嘴跑火車的人有時卻是對的。即使在網(wǎng)絡時代，面對一個糟糕的觀點，最好的回應是給出一個更好的論述。很多平臺在內容節(jié)制上過于嚴厲，而執(zhí)行上又存在很大的隨意性。如果馬斯克能發(fā)揮顛覆產(chǎn)業(yè)的天賦，協(xié)助解開言論自由的死結，大家都會從中受益。

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.

但我們也堅持另一項自由原則：機構應比經(jīng)營機構的個人更重要。馬斯克可以制定新規(guī)則，但他也應保證不參與規(guī)則的執(zhí)行。如果馬斯克真的想要讓用戶們相信，他將大公無私地守護這一“數(shù)字公共廣場“，就該改革，然后凍結自己的推特賬戶。