Elon Musk’s New Toy

Is the world’s richest man really driving Twitter into the ground (or the gutter)?

(Nathan Stirk / Contributor / Getty Images Europe)

Until now, I’ve held off on writing a post about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Journalists already spend far, far too much time thinking and writing about the social-media platform (just as they have long spent far too much time scrolling and tweeting on it). I figured I’d let them get their hot takes out of their system before I weighed in. This approach has the advantage of giving myself time to figure out what I really think, while also observing the conventional wisdom form and evolve as I compare it to my own experience.

The Great Exodus

That’s always been what I like most about Twitter: the window it gives me into the real-time formation of public opinion, at least among the very online, highly educated and informed, and (thus) ideologically coherent elites who work in the increasingly overlapping fields of media, politics, academia, and activism. In this respect, Twitter in the Musk era is working just as it always has.

Over the past few weeks, as juicy stories of turmoil, layoffs, firings, and en masse voluntary severance in Twitter’s corporate offices have piled up—and as Musk’s penchant for troll-tweeting and rash disruptive decisions has brought him constant attention—center-left journalists have been quick to proclaim the platform doomed, with many decamping to competing social-media platforms. As a result, Twitter feels a little quieter now. I’m down about 300 followers so far (out of 26,000 or so). Some of these disappearances may have been bots, but I suspect most are liberal and progressive writers and professors who have left for Mastodon, Post, or elsewhere.

I’m not going anywhere. I have no desire to marinate in a monoculture. I want my timeline to show me a broad spectrum of opinion. For that reason, I don’t object to Musk making that spectrum broader relative to six months ago by inviting back people who were banned by the old regime after the “disinformation” crackdown went into full force post-January 6. As long as I continue to wield the personal power to block the worst of the worst on the outer fringes, I’ll be happy with my experience there. Well, “happy” might be going too far. But I will be content that I’m getting what I’ve always looked for from the platform.

The World’s Messaging Board

Then again, this might not be the case if all the liberals and progressives disappear from Twitter. In that case, my timeline will become monocultural by default, showing me a spectrum extending from the center-right on through to the far right. The left will be talking to itself on other social networks and the right will be doing the same on Twitter, much as it already does on Parler, Gab, Truth Social, right-wing subreddits, and other niche platforms. That would be a terrible shame.

Saying so places me in the odd position of agreeing with those who’ve described Twitter as a kind of global messaging board that should aspire to something approaching neutrality in content moderation. Of course the algorithms at work behind the scenes have always attempted to curate what appears in each person’s timeline. But the platform has also given account-holders the power to decide how much to hand their timelines over to the algorithms.

I’ve always opted to hand over as little power as possible, making my timeline show me the latest tweets almost exclusively from accounts I follow. I might see a viral tweet from a stranger when someone I follow retweets or comments on it, and if I tweet something that kicks a wasp nest in some fringy corner of the Twitterverse I’ll find myself swarmed by abusive accounts. (That’s when my fingers get exercise from hitting the “Block” button.) But for the most part, checking Twitter for the past several years has been like checking in with a thousand or so well-informed, sometimes quite interesting, and occasionally supremely annoying acquaintances to see what, at any given moment, they think is important.

That’s what I’d prefer not to lose.

Drawing (and Erasing) Lines

But many on the “Resistance” center-left appear to disagree.