Change is often scary. You can ask my two cats, Aaron and Asher, about that. For the last several years, they’ve lived in our Arlington, Virginia, apartment on Columbia Pike, with the sounds of the city outside our windows and balcony. Moving to a big house in West Virginia had them hiding in a closet for nearly two days before getting used to their new surroundings.
Elon Musk is acquiring Twitter, and far too many people have behaved like frightened cats in the process.
I was an early adopter of the platform, joining when people were getting started with Facebook after ditching Myspace. Then, Twitter was a frontier, with many people asking, “Why do we need this?” Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama became the first high-profile politician to utilize Twitter. In 2009, Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter user to reach 1 million followers. It was also the year someone tweeted a photo of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 that Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed in the Hudson River.
Twitter quickly grew as the go-to place for journalists, politicians, and other politicos to share links, photos, pithy comments, and complaints. It became a haven for the elite, where a verification badge became a status symbol. It also became a tool for influential people to go after wrongthink. For example, in 2013, Buzzfeed published a story about a tweet by then-unknown public relations executive Justine Sacco. The tweet, a crude joke about AIDS in Africa, went viral, and she subsequently lost her job and became a pariah.
That incident changed Twitter and social media in general for the worse. The platform became a tool of retribution for lazy journalists who had nothing better to do than scour through social media posts until they found their “Aha!” moment and used it to generate clicky news stories that eventually had the target groveling and the reporter adding a notch to their belt.
Twitter is a bubble within a bubble. It’s like a coffee shop in San Francisco where the customer base moans and groans about how Mayor London Breed is too conservative. Unfortunately, people far too often think the world of Twitter is the real world, when the reality is that most people do not use Twitter, and most tweets come from a small subsection of the people who do.
It’s why the freakout (primarily on the Left) of an Elon Musk purchase of the platform is so inexplicable. Musk is an odd duck for sure, and I can’t quite figure out why he’d want to buy Twitter any more than he’d want to buy an actual dumpster fire, but it’s not my money, so c’est la vie.
The loudest delirium comes from the journalistic class — people who think, for whatever reason, that Twitter is their domain and don’t want someone like Musk coming in and mucking things up. Anand Giridharadas, in an absurd, pearl-clutching New York Times piece, writes that what Musk wants is a social media platform with no rules. Giridharadas says, “Instead, in a moment of proto-fascism on the political right, his [Musk] priority seems to be to undam the flood of bile and bigotry and bullying and disinformation.” Giridharadas went further during an MSNBC appearance with Joy Reid, saying Musk’s version of “free speech” is about “white men” saying whatever they want.
That’s the running theme among the journalistic fainting couch set who think Musk will allow their precious Twitter to get overrun by Nazis, white supremacists, and 4chan trolls. As I said, Musk is a strange fellow, but he’s also a damned good businessman, and it seems very unlikely that he and other investors would spend $44 billion on a social media platform only to throw it to the wolves to “own the libs.”
Furthermore, many bemoaning Musk’s possible ownership have referred to Twitter as a “public square.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In a traditional public square, where people gather for discussion and debate, those who participate have nonfinancial investments in the matters at hand. It’s time spent cultivating relationships and earning the trust of others that make it genuine. Twitter requires nothing more than an email address and a web browser to get involved. That’s a privilege, not an investment.
Also, the people who are up in arms over the possibility that @TrumpWon485949dvi4 will harass them can employ a host of tools that Twitter provides, such as blocking, removing followers, muting, filtering, etc. The user can adjust the experience to how they want it. The complainers know this, but why bother doing that when they can use the troll tweets for instant content?
The bottom line is that Musk won’t do much to improve or worsen Twitter, as it is already irrevocably broken. Like so many other institutions, Twitter lost the trust of the political user base on the Left and Right years ago. Unfortunately, an eccentric billionaire can’t unring that bell.
