Elon Musk's $44 Billion Troll
Take the Poll: Is Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter an elaborate - and expensive - trolling attempt?
For Jennifer Saul’s Philosophy of Language - Online Speech class we were assigned a paper by P.J. Connolly that examines trolling on online forums through the lens of seriousness. In short, this simply means that every act of trolling is to be judged on whether it can or should be taken seriously, which Connolly suggests leads to a trolling dilemma. While the technical details of the paper are not relevant to my discussion, the trolling dilemma is. Here is Connolly at the beginning of the paper, with emphasis added:
I suggest that central to acts of trolling is a notion of seriousness and its interplay between the troll, their target, and any onlookers to the act of trolling. By viewing trolling in this way we can understand better the rhetorical nature of an act of trolling and why we can often end up facing what I call the trolling dilemma—that is, in many acts of trolling the directions of reply are either to respond seriously to an utterance and so be trolled, or to acknowledge it as an unserious act of trolling and so dismiss it as mere trolling.
Later in the paper, he expands a bit on what he means; I have taken the liberty of striking out his examples and inserting my own:
Responding to the trolling utterance [seriously], though, allows the troll to successfully troll—the respondent thus becomes the target and does precisely what the troll wants. However, to not respond as if trolling utterances are serious statements, and simply dismiss them as acts of trolling, can therefore allow
a president to use racist tropes, or an RIP troll to direct abuse at mourners[Elon Musk to ‘Let That Sink In,’ spending $44B and firing the majority of Twitter staff] without challenge. In effect what this means is thata president using racist tropes[allowing the world’s richest man to buy a globally de-centralized communications firm in order to ‘own the libs’] can be dismissed as engaging in mere trolling.
Here is Elon Musk, walking in to Twitter HQ with a sink on October 26th, 2022, after closing a $44B deal to purchase Twitter from its shareholders and take it private.
Referencing the long-standing internet meme ‘Let That Sink In,’ Musk entered Twitter headquarters after locking out Twitter engineers in order to prevent them from making any changes while he brought in his own engineers from Tesla to start working their way through Twitter’s code. Within hours, Musk had fired most of the C-Suite, including the content moderator who banned Trump from the platform, picking up nearly $200 million in severance fees. Within three days, Musk was tweeting out links to conspiracy theories, after Nancy Pelosi’s husband was savagely attacked by a right-wing fanatic, an attempted assassination of the current Speaker of the House.
All of this action has serious consequences for how much of the world communicates. For much of the media, as well as for academics and business people, Twitter has been like a second home. While I’m not going to spend a lot of time describing why so many people rely on Twitter as a platform, it’s enough to know that Twitter facilitates a significant amount of global communication.
With all this in mind, I would suggest that having the single richest man in the world leverage 1/3 of his total wealth, a whopping $44 billion, to purchase a global communications platform for the purpose of ‘freeing free speech,’ only to treat his take-over like a complete joke, while the globe suffers the catastrophic effects of climate change and global poverty feels, to me any way, to be the very definition of a troll.
If Musk’s purchase of Twitter is an elaborate troll, what makes it such a difficult issue to work through is precisely whether the targets of the troll, along with onlookers and passer-bys, take it seriously as a troll. To this end, many people, including some celebrities, have suggested that it’s time to leave Twitter, to take civilized discussions somewhere else. This came after several bad actors, including bots and paid trolls, were observed pushing the limits of the Twitter content moderation team within minutes of Musk’s entrance by tweeting out the N-word millions of times. According to Connolly, those who take Musk seriously and choose to leave the platform would count as having been successfully trolled by Musk.
On the flip side, others have suggested that ceding the public square to someone who bought the platform more out of political spite than out of any intention to build a thriving communications platform, is irresponsible at best. Here is Climate Scientist Michael E. Mann:
This illustrates the second half of the dilemma, which is that by sticking around - or at least by seeming to take Musk’s takeover of Twitter in stride - the fact-based community, as Mann calls it (notably including Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey on the tweet), risks treating Musk’s troll as if it didn’t matter, as if it were, in Connolly’s words, mere trolling.
I don’t have any suggestions about a way out of this dilemma, though I think that one way out may simply be to dispute whether or not Musk’s purchase of Twitter counts as a troll in the first place, echoed by several folks in class. While it seems to me, anyway, that it’s a clear instance of a troll in progress, especially when he used an internet meme to announce his initial entrance into the building, I could be reading too much into what might plausibly be a straightforward business decision by the richest businessman in the world. I mean, Elon Musk is a genius, isn’t he? Between Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink, his companies have done a lot of good for humanity. Right?
EDIT: 4:45pm, October 31st, 2022
Perhaps in contrast to my painting of Musk's takeover of Twitter as a gigantic troll, this piece suggests that a) Musk ultimately bought Twitter because he was about to lose the lawsuit, a sort of 'you didn't fire me, I quit' routine, and b) that running Twitter will be hell on earth for Musk, possibly even his undoing.
And while Musk has announced a new “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” he will feel constantly compelled to either explain why he’s standing by his underlings’ moderation decisions, or reverse them. Then he will inevitably be drawn into personally making more and more content calls, perhaps giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to individual tweets.
It will be hell on earth for him. No matter what decisions he makes, he will infuriate large swaths of Twitter. The left will see its suspicions about him confirmed. The right will see him as a horrendous sellout, just another lying Big Tech swine. Joe Rogan will shake his head sadly about what happened to Elon. Eventually what used to give Musk the greatest pleasure, opening up Twitter on his phone, will be a source of excruciating pain.
And that’s just the beginning. Musk has important business interests around the world, and the potential riptides are endless. What happens when Kim Kardashian starts tweeting about how Taiwan is an independent country? Will the government of China quietly suggest to Musk that he do something about this, or will they make things hard for Tesla’s Shanghai plant and block the import of Teslas? What do other Tesla shareholders do if he defies China, and they find out his little bird app adventure is losing them money? What happens when a SpaceX rocket explodes, but Musk has been too busy adjudicating which Nazi furries are going to be suspended for a month?
Of course, I would suggest that neither the fact that he, by accident or by design, legally committed himself to buying Twitter nor the reality that it will end badly for him preclude the possibility or even the likelihood that this was a very expensive troll. Indeed, one can be put into a position, whether by others or by one's self, to react in non-normative ways, trolling being one possibile reaction. Moreover, whether one is successful in whatever comes from the troll or not does not change the fact that the purchase of Twitter was a troll, as evidenced by his obvious recycling of the old ‘Let That Sink In’ internet meme as he crashed through the entranceway at Twitter HQ.
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