Before changing into Twitter’s CEO, proprietor, and “Chief Twit,” Elon Musk had usually lobbed criticism on the platform for its strategy to content moderation, even going as far as to target the corporate’s former coverage chief Vijaya Gadde. But whereas Musk has expressed his concern about “liberal bias” on the platform, many activists, journalists, and advocates outdoors the US—the place the majority of Twitter’s customers reside—have begun to fret about how Twitter, now and not using a board or shareholders and led by a CEO with a number of enterprise entanglements, will reply to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning governments which have lengthy sought to manage public opinion.

“How he treats pressure from countries like Saudi Arabia and India—I think those are key indicators of where he’s going with the platform,” says David Kaye, former UN particular rapporteur on the suitable to freedom of opinion and expression and scientific professor of regulation on the University of California, Irvine.

While Twitter doesn’t boast practically as many customers as Meta-owned Facebook or Instagram, it’s extensively utilized by activists, civil society teams, journalists, and politicians—all of whom are influential in shaping public coverage and opinion. The platform has additionally proved essential for these organizing protests in locations like India, Nigeria, and Argentina, and has offered an avenue for these residing in extremely managed societies like Saudi Arabia to voice criticism of their governments.

Jason Pielemeier, govt director of the Global Network Initiative, says Musk’s objective to construct Twitter’s consumer base to greater than a billion people may additionally have an effect on his willingness to battle it out with international governments to maintain content material on the platform.

Although they might not symbolize an enormous share of Twitter’s income stream proper now, international locations like Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which have very massive, more and more on-line populations, are all engaging markets as the corporate seems to develop its income and improve its consumer base, in line with Pielemeier. But all of these international locations have had arguments with Twitter particularly or with social media corporations extra broadly, he says. Last 12 months, the Nigerian authorities ordered all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to dam Twitter after the platform deleted a tweet from the nation’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, for violating its insurance policies. The authorities lifted the ban solely after Twitter agreed to open an workplace within the nation and pay native taxes.

In India, Twitter’s third largest market, the corporate filed a case earlier this 12 months to contest the federal government’s order to take away particular person items of content material in addition to entire accounts that the federal government considers a threat to India’s safety or sovereignty.

But Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior worldwide counsel and Asia Pacific coverage director at Access Now, worries that Twitter below Musk might not proceed with the lawsuit. (In his August countersuit towards Twitter, Musk cited the lawsuit in India as a menace to the corporate’s presence in its third largest market.) “It would be a vindication of a very problematic, unconstitutional set of actions by the Indian government,” he says. “It also sends a signal to the global tech industry, saying ‘Back off, don’t try to do more.’”