At the end of last month, just after Elon Musk had bought Twitter, I wrote that having him responsible for an important part of the world’s public sphere could turn out to be “like entrusting a delicate clock to a monkey”. This struck some readers, especially those with tech backgrounds, as intemperate, but everything that has happened since suggests that it was bang on the money.
The world has watched transfixed as the monkey flails around wondering what to do with his shiny new plaything. He can do whatever he likes with it, so we watch breathlessly to see what he tries next and speculate endlessly on whether this stunt or that one will do the trick. We are like spectators watching a chess grandmaster playing some practice games – trying this gambit or that; moving pieces on a board; tearing up the board and refashioning it as a sphere; and so on. The fact that the pieces on this chessboard are human beings – with mortgages, dependents, health insurance, etc – is nowhere mentioned, except by Maria Farrell in her splendid, excoriating essay on the takeover. She too has been through a narcissistic acquisition and knows what it’s like for real people.
First off, Musk tried sacking half of the staff, but then had to persuade some of them to come back because he hadn’t realised how much his plaything needed them. Then some really key Twitter executives resigned, a dramatic turn that led the Federal Trade Commission to take an active interest in what was going on. Next, he tried charging users $8 a month for the coveted “blue” verified status, only to discover that this was exactly what a legion of trolls, shysters and scammers had been excitedly waiting for. On 12 November, the Twitter account @EliLillyandCo tweeted: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” At the time, the account had the blue check mark implying that Twitter had verified its authenticity as the pharma giant. It hadn’t.
Nor did possession abate the new owner’s Twitter habit. Shortly after taking over, Musk tweeted a link to a false anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory from a misinformation website about the savage attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. “There is a tiny possibility,” Musk tweeted, “there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He afterwards deleted the link, but not before it had already attracted more than 24,000 retweets and 86,000 “likes”.
While all of this was going on, a lot of major advertisers had, er, “paused” their advertising on the platform. Musk then tried to compose a soothing letter to them. The reason he had bought Twitter, he explained, was “because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence”. “I didn’t do it because it would be easy,” he went on. “I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom [sic] I love.”
Aw, shucks. Two things are striking about the letter. The first is its naivety. The hard-faced advertising executives to whom it was addressed don’t give a toss about the future of civilisation: what bothers them is the risk to their brands from being associated with the “hellscape” that Musk’s enthusiasm for unfettered free speech might produce. Musk built Tesla and SpaceX into formidable companies partly by not caring what people thought of him. But he’s now dealing with a company – and an industry – where it matters what advertisers think of him.
The other striking thing is his delusion that Twitter is – or could be – the “digital town square”. As the veteran tech analyst Ben Thompson puts it in his newsletter: “The digital town square is the internet, broadly; Twitter is more akin to a digital cage match, perhaps best monetised on a pay-per-view basis.” A bit like cock fighting, in other words, but without the feathers.
Underpinning Musk’s views about free speech and the public sphere (AKA town square) is the fatuous metaphor of “the marketplace of ideas” that emerged from the deliberations of the US supreme court in 1953 (though something like it was mooted by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes way back in 1919). It suggests that ideas compete with each other in a conceptual marketplace where they can be critically evaluated by every individual. As law professor David Pozen and others have pointed out, there’s no empirical evidence that a larger volume of speech, or a more open “marketplace” of ideas, tends to lead people away from falsity and towards truth. Subscribing to the metaphor is thus either a matter of faith or of evidence-free credulity. And if Musk believes that it is the secret sauce for managing Twitter then he’s a bigger crackpot than even I thought.
What I’ve been reading
Blind spots
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens is an interesting and accessible academic article on the usefulness of learning what to ignore in online discourse.
Just disconnect
The Age of Social Media Is Ending is a perceptive essay by Ian Bogost in the Atlantic.
Entente cordiale
Macron and Sunak: Two Peas in a Pod. And it’s not just the skinny suits, either. A sharp essay by Robert Zaretsky in Politico.
