It could be very bad…
This by Brian Beutler is the best thing I’ve read on the subject:
Brace yourselves for a lot of words about Twitter. I hesitate to devote a whole newsletter to Twitter and Elon Musk and What It All Means, since most of you I’m guessing either don’t use Twitter or think Twitter is stupid or beyond redemption. On top of that I think there’s a decent chance that Musk, this whimsical imp, might back out of his deal when he realizes he’s done something stupid, or that making something successful (that is, profitable and durable) out of his impulsive decision will require immense effort, all in service of a tool that’s less useful to the world than clean cars, solar panels, and space rockets. A guy this horny for an edit button seems prone to backtracking.
But there’s an uncanny, panglossian quality to a lot of the elite commentary about Musk and Twitter—reminiscent of earlier panglossian commentary about, e.g., the Iraq war and Fox News and Donald Trump and COVID-19—so I want to balance out their arguments with a considered explanation of why it’s worth taking alarmist scenarios seriously, instead of telling various Cassandras, once again, to calm down. Not because the bad scenarios are inevitable, but because they’re highly plausible, and some of the worst, most passionately intense people on the planet will try to steer things in a dark direction.
① TWEET FROM THE CHAFF
Just to clear the air, my own Twitter experience has nothing to do with my concerns about Musk taking over the company. Honestly. There are people whose personal user experiences will be harmed by the new ownership, but I’m not one of them. There are systemic problems with Twitter that will probably get worse thanks to his interventions, but I doubt they’ll affect me any more in the future than they do today.
For people in the news gathering/reporting/analyzing business, Twitter is an immensely powerful, and in recent years indispensable, tool. I’ve been active on it in a professional capacity for over a decade and for most of that time, I’ve really had no choice in the matter. There are political journalists who are specialized or sinecured or behind-the-scenes enough to get by without ever logging on to Twitter, but I’ve never been one of them. For better or worse (spoiler: worse) my jobs have always required me to be current to the day, if not the hour, on political news, and completely fluent in the political discourse, and that’s nearly impossible in 2022 without at least lurking on the platform.
The thing that makes all of that tolerable is that among all the social networks, Twitter is perhaps the most customizable. So if you’re unusually media literate, have good mental habits, and at least some self control, you can use Twitter for almost exclusively edifying purposes. That’s even easier when you’re a white guy whose account isn’t constantly spammed by bigots and sexists, and even easier still when you have employers who aren’t likely to bend to online mobs ginned up in bad faith. I pick whom I follow, whom I interact with, and I do it all in chronological order rather than by “engagement,” so I don’t get bombarded with garbage and deception, and the relatively few trolls (including a handful of antisemites) who would like to ruin my experience are largely shouting into the void.
So in that sense I’m lucky. On the other hand, the inevitable consequence of this mandatory immersion experiment I’ve conducted on myself is addiction. It takes several days of real vacation before the nagging sense that I’m too far behind on the news ebbs enough for me to relax. I’m not addicted to retweets or clout, but to a sense that I have a current handle on what’s happening in the world, and I blame that as much on the design of Twitter as on the line of work I’ve chosen for myself. It wouldn’t be so bad (either for me or for the world) if Twitter just blinked out of existence one day. But it would require me to make much more use of different, older information tools (email, RSS), and then I’d just be chasing those dragons instead.
Naturally, I hope Musk doesn’t make this service, which I have no choice but to patronize, worse for me. I also recognize that would be a pretty selfish jumping off point for musing about the consequences of him taking the company private. And yet sadly I think a lot of the misguided commentary about Musk stems from that premise: What do I think of Twitter, and, given that assessment, do I imagine Musk will improve or degrade it?
And if that’s where you start, it makes perfect sense to shrug it all off and assume little will change, or that all the alarm is much ado about nothing, because from almost everyone’s personal perspective, very little will change. That may be so, but it’s also deeply myopic. It’s like observing that a typical, detached channel surfer won’t meaningfully change his media-consumption habits simply because Comcast adds Fox News to his cable package. Most Twitter users don’t use Twitter for news and politics; many of the people who DO use it for those purposes (and then write think pieces about Twitter) have well curated feeds and post vanilla posts about vanilla topics. This is not a dangerous moment for them.
I think better starting points are questions like: Why does Musk want to control Twitter? Why did he think controlling it was worth the GDP of Bahrain? And what will the aggregate effect of the likeliest changes be on big constructs like The Discourse, the political agenda, and society. To extend that last analogy, what’s important isn’t how having Fox News available to you affects your experience of cable television; what’s important is who owns Fox News, and the fact that it’s available to tens of millions of Americans.
② THE CODE TO HELL
If we assume Musk completes the purchase, and that his attentions don’t quickly wander, then I think two seminal episodes in the evolution of the modern right will prove to be instructive.
The first piece of history to remember is that the professional right wing spent decades trying to sow mass distrust in mainstream media. Many of the conservatives who participated in that subversion were intimately familiar with how news-gathering worked, because they were woven into the political information system that produced “news” for the whole country. They knew that national political journalism was not a party-aligned institution, but they also didn’t want their movement and their political leaders to be vulnerable to the scrutiny of mainstream news reporters. So they misled people into believing regular media was a propaganda system built and maintained by the Democratic Party. Then they claimed to be building a news-media platform that would strip out all the biases of “liberal media.” But what they actually did was create Fox News—an actual party propaganda channel.
A narrower episode to remember is the “IRS scandal” of several years back. There you had a situation where the IRS was doing its clumsy best, with limited resources, to make sure tax-exempt political nonprofits on the left and right weren’t advocating for or against candidates or parties. But of course conservatives weren’t interested in getting right with tax law, nor were they even seeking to create some false parity in enforcement between liberal and conservative nonprofits. What they wanted was to discredit the IRS and Barack Obama and tarnish any effort to make them follow the rules as illegitimate and Nixonian. Thus, for years, they insisted the IRS “targeted” conservatives for harassment; many of them said it so robotically and with such little regard for the facts that they probably, to this day, believe their own propaganda.
Why are these episodes key to understanding the future of Twitter?
First, conservatives are giddy with anticipation that Musk will publish Twitter’s algorithms, which they insist will contain smoking gun proof of SHADOW BANS and other forms of anti-Republican censorship. Some of these conservatives may be high on their own supply, others know they’re full of shit. But the lesson the above history teaches is that it doesn’t matter what the algorithms actually contain: they will insist it proves Twitter thumbed the scale for Democrats, no matter what.
There is about a zero percent chance that any of Twitter’s proprietary code has a “Democrats good, Republicans bad” intentionality written into it. What they may well find is that Twitter’s automated, neutral efforts to tamp down on incitement and disinformation hits the right harder than the left organically because conservatives are disproportionately the purveyors of that kind of swill. Like the IRS scandal they will allege a conspiracy anyhow. And then, as when they established Fox News, they will push Musk to build the punitive system that existed only in their fever dreams, but to aim it in reverse, at the left.
Through all that, I have little confidence that influential liberals will apply any kind of counter-pressure. They certainly didn’t through the IRS episode. But it should be commonplace for truth-telling people to observe that conservatives are more harmed by content moderation because they are more inclined to bad acting; that, in fact, bad acting is uniquely part of their value system. And we should also note that these content-moderation tools don’t exist because Twitter is “woke” or “biased.” Twitter built them reluctantly because it realized Nazis are bad for business, and incitement-to-violence is a huge liability risk for platforms that ignore it. Twitter didn’t eject the Nazis and Trump out of some sense of magnanimity but by a desire to diminish brand damage and, in Trump’s case, liability for ignoring further violence their own cyber-threat teams saw coming.
But note that even if conservatives fail to capture Twitter and turn it into a Fox News-style weapon against the left, even if we just take Musk at his word—that his Twitter will upset “the far right and the far left equally…”
…that would still a huge boon for the people in American politics who’ve embraced trolling, agit-prop, and Orwellian lies as tools for accumulating power. A gift to the far right.
③ MORE MUSK, MORE FUSS
It’s tempting to evaluate Musk’s intentions instrumentally. Maybe all of Twitter’s editorial choices are misguided, and the company can best be neutral by ditching algorithmic content preferences altogether, let Trump and the Nazis back on Twitter but without the benefit of computer programs that seek to boost or limit engagement. Maybe that’ll actually be good for the Democrats! Do Republicans really benefit from association with the alt-right and Trump’s unleashed Id?
But let’s be real. 1) That is not going to happen, in part because there’s no reason to think Musk wants it to or that he can make Twitter a “public square” or “right-size its influence” without bankrupting the company and losing a fortune.
It also just strikes me as a naive misreading of what Republicans value about their propaganda systems. If they were worried that Trump and Nazis posting more would hurt them, they wouldn’t have expressed much interest in the Musk v. Twitter fight. Instead they’ve been keenly interested; they’ve even picked a side, in their new fascistic way, by promising to take revenge against Twitter if it declined Musk’s bid. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) threatened to dump a million shares of Twitter stock from Florida’s pension fund if it sought to block the takeover. House Republicans threatened to investigate the company, should they hold the majority next year, if it didn’t accept Musk’s offer.
If you want to be a bit too cute you can theorize that DeSantis wanted Musk to buy Twitter, so that Trump would get his account back and damage himself. But the simpler explanation is that Republicans think the Twitter of 2016 was better for them than the Twitter of today is.
And though the N is small, they have a good reason to think that. The Twitter of 2016 was the one that existed right before Republicans won a governing trifecta in Washington. They like it when the dregs of the world smear and abuse their opponents, and run info ops against them. They like flooding the zone with shit.
I think that’s the new baseline we should expect if the deal sticks: More racist and sexist abuse than currently exists, more well-financed and government-directed campaigns to spread knowing lies, more incitement. In fact that already seems to be happening, just by dint of awareness that Twitter accepted Musk’s offer.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, above and beyond that, Musk (this Musk) built the pro-Republican censorship and propaganda system the right so clearly hopes he will.
And from there it’s a short hop to slightly further-fetched but still easy-to-imagine scenarios. One way for Musk to come out ahead with Twitter is to turn Twitter profitable; another way is to use Twitter to help drive election outcomes that make him richer, even as Twitter itself serves as a twisted kind of loss-leader for him. The surest way for his fortune to grow would be for a Republican trifecta to come to power in 2025 and cut his taxes. Just five-and-a-half years ago the conditions for electing a Republican trifecta included more right-wing friendly social media, and also the disclosure of the private communications of prominent Democrats. Musk is about to gain the power to recreate both of those conditions. Would he make mischief like that in U.S. politics? Would he make mischief internationally? I have no idea, but I know he behaves like someone who believes the rules don’t apply to him, and I know just as certainly that other people of low character will descend on him like vultures asking him or bribing him or blackmailing him for favors. Trump already happily asks Vladimir Putin and other foreign leaders to smear his political enemies; why not Musk?
If the last several years have taught us anything it isn’t that the worst thing always happens, but that insufficient vigilance allows terrible things to happen quite often. With or without vigilance, it’s perfectly possible, maybe even likely, that Musk balks, or just gets bored with his toy, or that he turns it into some kind of unrecognizable crypto farm. But without vigilance—without appropriate scrutiny from Congress and regulators, and without deserved skepticism of other members of the political elite—we are more likely to be shocked, once again, by how depraved the schemes of greedy men can be, and how determined they are to see them through.
By the way, the major stockholder in the new CNN is John Malone, right wing supporters of Donald Trump. In case you wondered what might be about to happen there after all their turmoil…