Why Tesla founder Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is less important than it seems
Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter for the supposed purpose of unfettering free expression, he had used the platform to publish baseless accusations of pedophilia, provoke a federal fraud investigation and peddle flamethrowers. It’s enough to make some miss the idiosyncrasies of the former face of the platform, Jack Dorsey, whose ice baths, self-starvation and weird beard targeted his own person for most of the punishment.
And miss Dorsey many are. Musk’s conquest of the company was regarded in some quarters with all the foreboding of an apocalypse, replete with tearful celebrity epitaphs for the platform and dark premonitions about democracy’s demise. Others greeted the automaker as a liberator, buying his bogus line about a new dawn of “free speech,” a concept he and his adherents appear to understand only in the crudest terms, as enabling harassment, misinformation and sedition.
Fortunately, they’re all wrong. Twitter is an imaginary country crowded with actual and aspiring celebrities, politicians and journalists. All are prone to overestimate their own importance as well as that of the platform that enables them to endlessly pelt each other with their ill-considered, half-formed, unedited thoughts — one of the signature features of Twitter being a categorical prohibition, despite endless outcry, of editing.
But more than three in four American adults don’t in fact have any contact with Twitter, according to a recent Pew survey. Moreover, of the 23% who are on the platform, the vast majority are barely on it: The top quarter of Twitter users — that is, a quarter of less than a quarter — produce 97% of the tweets. And a good portion of the “people” using the site aren’t people at all: One study estimated that bots make up as much as 15% of Twitter accounts.
Even among the active human tweeters, the Pew poll found, originality is rare and interaction rarer. More than 80% of their activity consists of retweets or replies to other users. And even in the top quartile, the average twitterer enjoys just one retweet a month. It’s a cavernous echo chamber reverberating with the unreconstructed streams of consciousness of a minuscule sliver of the population.
That’s not to discount the influence, mostly pernicious, of social media. But anyone determined to worry about that shouldn’t waste their worries on Twitter, whose penetration among Americans is dwarfed by that of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram (which is also Facebook). Even LinkedIn and Pinterest, platforms rarely on the radars of authoritarian politicians or thirsty billionaires, reach a greater share of the population.
Granted, Musk, whose acolytes insist he is a genius, is indeed ingenious at drawing disproportionate attention to himself. His $44 billion purchase of Twitter seems like a very expensive extension of his trollish use of the platform — the mother of all virulent tweets.
His brief foray into ownership has already seen him suggest Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters should be turned into a homeless shelter because, under an indefinite remote work policy, “no one shows up anyway” — in marked contrast to the people making his electric cars, who were compelled to show up at Tesla’s East Bay plant in the teeth of the pandemic, the seriousness of which he recklessly denied (where else?) on Twitter. He has also helped inspire a torrent of racist, misogynistic abuse of an executive who championed content moderation, to which Musk vehemently objects because it might require moderating him.
Dorsey’s regime did lead a halfhearted charge toward lightly monitoring what it publishes in recent years, but only in the face of historic catastrophes exacerbated by social-media-fueled misinformation, namely the deadliest pandemic in U.S. history and the worst attack on Congress since the War of 1812. Labeling garbage tweets and expelling the president who led a failed coup count for corporate citizenship only in the context of Silicon Valley’s general, persistent and abject irresponsibility.
Musk unquestionably represents a deterioration of an already lamentable state of affairs. But from Hearst to hedge funds, media companies have always been vulnerable to dubious ownership. The difference is that old media are subject to legal, regulatory and normative constraints.
Free speech, as the Constitution actually construes it, is supposed to protect publishers from government interference — including that of authoritarian former presidents and lawmakers — not excuse them from choosing, editing and bearing responsibility for what they publish. If Twitter and its ilk are important, let’s respond by regulating them, not idly hoping that the next person running them is the rare bird among billionaires who cares about anyone else.