Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
The first thing that should be noted in any conversation about Elon Musk and twitter is that there are a lot of people – many of them writing about the topic for a living – who desperately want him to fail.
The reasons for their enmity are straightforward: The whole Musk project, from day one, has been focused on breaking the power of those who held it on the twitter app for a long time. Before he took over, many journalists were granted a form of privileged speech where their views were actively promoted and filtered out ahead of the views of the great unwashed. To many on the right, this was a form of censorship and suppression. To many on the left, it was about promoting quality and trustworthiness over unfettered free speech. And regardless of who is right, it’s just a fact that a core part of the Musk project has been to devalue and remove the privileged positions of many journalists who’d built whole careers around their blue ticks.
Go figure that they’re not Musk fans.
The flip side of this, however, is that we live in a tribal age. And once Musk declared himself the enemy of the ancien regime, the revolutionaries flocked to his banner. Criticising Elon or acknowledging the problems with his approach has become a thought crime in parts of the western right that’s almost, if not quite, on a par with criticising Donald Trump.
But it seems to me that Musk, in appeasing the right, is playing a very dangerous game with his platform.
Twitter has a few strengths, but by far the biggest one is its genuine claim to be a sort of global townhall where all views might be found. This is the reason it has outlasted and outshone most of its competitors – go to Truth Social or Parler or Gettr on the right, and you’ll find echo chambers of the devoted, where no ideas need be shared if memes can be shared instead. Because there is no argument, there are no ideas. The same proved true of Mastodon on the left, when, after Musk’s takeover, the most tiresome people in Ireland started calling themselves “Mastodaoine” and fled to a new website where, they discovered, there wasn’t much to talk about after they’d finished congratulating themselves over their love of Taytos and milky tea and other stereotypical “aren’t we gas craic” Irish things.
This is the thing about a culture war: It’s no fun for anyone if there’s no enemy to fight. Or in more normal person terms, it’s not that interesting to live in an echo chamber, if you are any kind of a thinking person.
Musk’s other problem, simply, is one of power:
Twitter has lost almost half of its advertising revenue since it was bought by Elon Musk for $44bn (£33.6bn) last October, its owner has revealed.
He said the company had not seen the increase in sales that had been expected in June, but added that July was a “bit more promising”.
As Bud Lite, on the other side of the ledger, has painfully discovered, it is the buyer, not the seller, who has power in any marketplace. Whether fairly or unfairly, Musk’s management of “twitter blue” – which turned the blue tick from a sign of socially granted prestige into a sign that you’d bent the knee to Elon (as this writer did, for clarity) had the fairly predictable side effect of devaluing his product just at the very time he was deciding to sell it. “Pay 8 bucks for something that no longer carries a social status” was, in hindsight, probably a very bad move.
And from the point of view of advertisers, he has replaced a socially approved elite class with a socially suspected elite class, on the very platform he wants them to pay for access to. Where once their product might have appeared under a tweet from Taylor Swift or Katie Couric, now it might appear under one from QanonShaman465. In monetary terms, by moving in the “free speech” direction, he’s probably made his product less attractive to advertisers.
Because free speech is messy. And brands do not like messy.
There is, I would argue, a balance to be struck between free speech on the one hand, and overtly antagonizing your existing customers on another.
Musk could simply have ended the privileged position in timelines and elsewhere of the previous verified users (while allowing them to remain verified), and put an end to shadowbanning and other speech-suppressing tools abused by the previous ownership. Or he could (and I think should) have opened twitter blue for newcomers, while allowing the legacy people to retain the service as a nod to the fact that they had helped build the platform.
He could and should, also, have made himself into a less partisan figure. When the owner of the platform is weighing in daily on issues from the Ukraine War, to Ron DeSantis, to the trustworthiness of the FBI, then that sends a signal – whether it is fair or not – about where his platform stands. If you don’t believe me, then just imagine if the owner of twitter was campaigning every day for trans rights, and ask whether you’d trust his platform to be neutral.
If he’s not careful, Musk could turn twitter into Gettr or Parler. And that would be a tremendously expensive shame for him, and for the rest of us who actually need, and can benefit from, the genuinely global town square he promised.
This will close in 10 seconds