By BARBARA ORTUTAY and AMANDA SEITZ

Associated Press – Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is spending $44 billion to acquire Twitter with the stated aim of turning it into a haven for “free speech.” There’s just one problem: The social platform has been down this road before, and it didn’t end well.

A decade ago, a Twitter executive dubbed the company “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to underscore its commitment to untrammeled freedom of expression. Subsequent events put that moniker to the test, as repressive regimes cracked down on Twitter users, particularly in the wake of the short-lived “Arab Spring” demonstrations. In the U.S., a visceral 2014 article by journalist Amanda Hess exposed the incessant, vile harassment many women faced just for posting on Twitter or other online forums.

Over the subsequent years, Twitter learned a few things about the consequences of running a largely unmoderated social platform — one of the most important being that companies generally don’t want their ads running against violent threats, hate speech that bleeds into incitement, and misinformation that aims to tip elections or undermine public health.

“With Musk, his posturing of free speech — just leave everything up — that would be bad in and of itself,” said Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University. “If you stop moderating with automated systems and human reviews, a site like Twitter, in the space of a short period of time, you would have a cesspool.”

Google, Barrett pointed out, quickly learned this lesson the hard way when major companies like Toyota and Anheuser-Busch yanked their ads after they ran ahead of YouTube videos produced by extremists in 2015.

Once it was clear just how unhealthy the conversation had gotten, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey spent years trying to improve what he called the “health” of the conversation on the platform.

The company was an early adopter of the “report abuse” button after U.K. member of parliament Stella Creasy received a barrage of rape and death threats on the platform. The online abuse was the result of a seemingly positive tweet in support of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who successfully advocated for novelist Jane Austen to appear on a British banknote. Creasy’s online harasser was sent to prison for 18 weeks.

Twitter has continued to craft rules and invested in staff and technology that detect violent threats, harassment and misinformation that violates its policies. After evidence emerged that Russia used their platforms to try to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, social media companies also stepped up their efforts against political misinformation.

The big question now is how far Musk, who describes himself as a “free-speech absolutist,” wants to ratchet back these systems — and whether users and advertisers will stick around if he does.

Even now, Americans say they’re more likely to be harassed on social media than any other online forum, with women, people of color and LGBTQ users reporting a disproportionate amount of that abuse. Roughly 80% of users believe the companies are still doing only a “fair or poor” job of handling that harassment, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults last year.

Meanwhile, terms like “censorship” and “free speech” have turned into political rallying cries for conservatives, frustrated by seeing right-leaning commentators and high-profile Republican officials booted off Facebook and Twitter for violating their rules.

Musk appeared to criticize Twitter’s permanent ban of President Donald Trump last year for messages that the tech company said helped incite the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year.

“A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk tweeted days after Trump was banned from both Facebook and Twitter.

Trump’s allies, including his son Donald Trump Jr., have even pleaded for Musk to buy out the company.

“If Elon Musk can privately send people into space I’m sure he can design a social network that isn’t biased,” Trump Jr. said in the caption of a video posted to Instagram last April.

Kirsten Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame, said Twitter has consistently worked at being a “responsible” social media company through its moderation system, its hires in the area of machine learning ethics and in whom they allow to do research on the platform. The fact that Musk wants to change that, she added, suggests that he’s focused on “irresponsible social media.”

Twitter declined to comment for this story. A representative for Musk did not immediately respond to a message for comment.

New social media apps targeted at conservatives, including Trump’s Truth Social, haven’t come remotely close to matching the success of Facebook or Twitter. That’s partly because Republican politicians, politicians and causes already draw large audiences on existing, and much better established, platforms.

It’s also partly due to floods of inflammatory, false or violent posts. Last year, for example, right-wing social media site Parler was nearly wiped off the internet when it became evident that rioters had used the app to promote violent messages and organize the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol. Apple and Google barred its app from their online stores, while Amazon stopped providing web-hosting services for the site.

Musk himself regularly blocks social media users who have criticized him or his company and sometimes bullies reporters who have written critical articles about him or Tesla. He regularly tweets at reporters who write about his company, sometimes mischaracterizing their work as “false” or “misleading.”

His popular tweets typically send a swarm of his social media fans directly to the accounts of the reporters to harass them for hours or days.

“I only block people as a direct insult,” Musk tweeted in 2020, responding to a tweet from a reporter.

Evan Greer, a political activist with Fight for the Future, said Musk’s lack of experience in moderating an influential social media platform will be a problem if he successfully takes over the company.

“If we want to protect free speech online, then we can’t live in a world where the richest person on Earth can just purchase a platform that millions of people depend on and then change the rules to his liking,” Greer said.

By DAVID KEYTON

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia unleashed a string of attacks against Ukrainian rail and fuel facilities Monday, striking crucial infrastructure far from the front line of its eastern offensive, which Britain said has yet to achieve a significant breakthrough.

Meanwhile, two fires were reported at oil facilities in western Russia. It was not clear what caused the blazes.

As both sides in the 2-month-old war brace for what could be a grinding battle of attrition in the country’s eastern industrial heartland, top American officials pledged more help to ensure Ukraine prevails.

In meetings with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Sunday, the American secretaries of state and defense said Washington had approved a $165 million sale of ammunition for Ukraine’s war effort, along with more than $300 million in foreign military financing.

“The strategy that we’ve put in place — massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia, solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts — is having real results,” Blinken told reporters in Poland the day after the meeting.

“When it comes to Russia’s war aims, Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding,” he added.

Speaking Monday to top officials at the Prosecutor General’s office, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the U.S. and its allies have tried and failed to “split Russian society and to destroy Russia from within.”

When Russia invaded on Feb, 24, its apparent goal was a lightning offensive that would quickly take the capital and perhaps even topple the government in Kyiv. But the Ukrainians, aided by Western weapons, bogged Putin’s troops down and thwarted their push to Kyiv.

Moscow now says its focus in the eastern region of the Donbas, but one senior military official says it also wants to control southern Ukraine. While both sides said the campaign in the east has begun, it has yet to gather steam.

A small group of Ukrainian troops holed up in a steel plant in the strategic city of Mariupol are tying down Russian forces, and keeping them from being added to the offensive elsewhere in the Donbas, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said Monday.

Over the weekend, Russian forces launched fresh airstrikes on the steel plant in an attempt to dislodge the estimated 2,000 fighters inside. An estimated 1,000 civilians are also sheltering in the steelworks, and the Russian military pledged to open a humanitarian corridor Monday for them to leave.

Mariupol has endured fierce fighting since the start of the war because of its strategic location on the Sea of Azov. In addition to freeing up Russian troops, its capture would deprive Ukraine of a vital port and allow Moscow to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.

But for now, the British Defense Ministry said that Russia has “yet to achieve a significant breakthrough” since shifting its focus to the Donbas. Ukrainian forces have repelled numerous assaults in the past week and “inflicted significant cost on Russian forces,” it said.

Instead, Russian missiles and war planes struck far behind the frontline of that offensive on Monday.

Oleksandr Kamyshin, the head of the state-run Ukrainian Railways, said five railway facilities in central and western Ukraine were hit early Monday, including a missile attack near the western city of Lviv.

Serhiy Borzov, the governor of Ukraine’s central Vinnytsia region, said there were casualties after rocket strikes targeting “critical infrastructure.” It was not clear if that referred to the attacks on the railways.

Russia also destroyed an oil refinery in Kremenchuk in central Ukraine, along with fuel depots there, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Monday. In all, Russian warplanes destroyed 56 Ukrainian targets overnight, he said.

Meanwhile, a major fire erupted early Monday at an oil depot in a Russian city about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Ukrainian border, Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said. No cause was given for the blaze.

The oil depot in Bryansk is owned by a subsidiary of the Russian state-controlled company Transneft, which operates the Druzhba pipeline that carries crude west to other European countries. It wasn’t clear if the depot was part of the pipeline infrastructure and whether the blaze could affect those deliveries.

The ministry said in a statement that the huge blaze damaged a depot containing diesel fuel. It noted that the region has enough diesel for 15 days.

A Russian news report said that another oil storage facility in Bryansk also caught fire early Monday, and the cause wasn’t immediately known.

Last month, two Ukrainian helicopter gunships hit an oil reservoir in Russia’s Belgorod region, which lies on the Ukrainian border, causing a fire.

In a video address Monday, Zelenskyy described his meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as “encouraging and, importantly, effective.”

The Ukrainian leader added that they agreed “on further steps to strengthen the armed forces of Ukraine and meet all the priority needs of our army.” Earlier, he praised U.S. President Joe Biden for his “personal support.”

The three-hour meeting came Sunday, the 60th day since the start of the invasion, as Ukraine pressed the West for more powerful weapons against Russia’s campaign in the Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists controlled some territory before the war.

With Russia’s shift in focus, Austin said Ukraine’s military needs are changing, and Zelenskyy is now focused on more tanks, artillery and other munitions.

Asked about what the U.S. sees as success, Austin said that “we want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory, we want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.”

As Blinken and Austin left Ukraine, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was scheduled to travel to Turkey on Monday and then Moscow and Kyiv. Zelenskyy criticized Guterres for visiting Russia before Ukraine.

Blinken said he had spoken with Guterres on Friday ahead of the trip.

“Our expectation is that he’s going to carry a very strong and clear message to Vladimir Putin, which is the need to end this war now,” he said.

In a boost for Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron comfortably won a second term Sunday over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, who had pledged to dilute France’s ties with the European Union and NATO. Le Pen had also spoken out against EU sanctions on Russian energy and had faced scrutiny during the campaign over her previous friendliness with the Kremlin.

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Associated Press journalists Yesica Fisch in Sloviansk, Ukraine, Mstyslav Chernov and Felipe Dana in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Yuras Karmanau and Jon Gambrell in Lviv, Cara Anna, Inna Varenytsia and Oleksandr Stashevskyi in Kyiv and AP staff around the world contributed.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine