“Better user authentication and eliminating bots would be very helpful. Companies want to know when it’s bots and when it’s not bots. Is it a bot clicking on your ad, or is it a real person?”
During his time at the ACCC, Mr Sims led the long-running Digital Platforms inquiry, which, among other things, investigated internet advertising and called for greater transparency in the way news and other content is automatically distributed by social media algorithms.
“But [Mr Musk] seems to be going further than we did,” he said. “We wanted more transparency, but he’s now saying he’s going to publish the algorithms.
“If he does that, I think it’s terrific, because it means that other media companies, particularly social media companies, can no longer say it can’t be done.
“To have greater transparency in Twitter could well be a precedent for other companies. That’s why I’m very excited by it. It may well benefit society.”
Mr Sims said his comments were limited to Mr Musk’s promise to open up the Twitter algorithms and improve user authentication. He declined to comment on Mr Musk’s reported intention to scale back content moderation, saying that was not something the ACCC looked into during his tenure.
But Chis Cooper, executive director of the public policy lobby group Reset Australia, said Mr Musk’s takeover only reinforced the need for governments to step in and take charge of speech on the internet.
“If you needed another sign that self-regulation isn’t going to work, then Musk buying Twitter is it,” Mr Cooper said.
“The scale and influence of these companies on public discourse and the functioning of democracy can’t be understated. This is another signal that we need proper regulation of big tech’s business model.
“Effective regulation that protects free speech while limiting the threats of hate speech and disinformation is possible, and the European Digital Services Act is proof that it is possible and inevitable.”
Users have raised concerns that Mr Musk’s focus on free speech could lead to watering down Twitter’s rules, less content moderation and reinstating accounts that have been banned from the platform, such as former US president Donald Trump.
Australia’s Commissioner for eSafety, Julie Inman Grant, said her agency would keep an eye on any policy changes at Twitter.
“It’s difficult to speculate at this stage about what this takeover means for Australian Twitter users and their online safety, but we are glad to hear that Elon Musk believes local laws need to be observed wherever Twitter operates,” Ms Inman Grant said.
She said it was clear the entire technology industry needed to lift its safety standards and consistently and effectively enforce its own rules.
“Trust and safety and moderation are very complex areas and require more than just artificial intelligence to manage.
“We’re talking about human behaviour and human interactions here – so human intervention is also needed – and this includes Twitter consistently and effectively enforcing its own safety policies,” Ms Inman Grant said.
Kelsey Hightower, principal engineer for Google Cloud, said it could be technically difficult for Mr Musk to make all the changes he wanted.
It would be challenging for Twitter to implement an edit function, for instance, and it was clear Mr Musk also did not know how this would work.
“If an edit button will improve the lives of people around the world, so be it. But it will be hard. I watched his TED Talk on this and he didn’t have a perfect answer,” Mr Hightower said.
The ACCC was contacted for comment.
