Why Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter Matters for Democracy
If you control Twitter, you can control information at its source.
I was having a spirited discussion with some friends around Elon Musk's likely purchase of Twitter. A buddy suggested that Twitter was a dying market, and that he didn't understand why Musk would make such an unwise investment. I argued that this represented a misreading of the value of Twitter as an information dissemination tool instead of as a social network. Indeed, thinking of Twitter as a social network in the way we think of Instagram and Facebook is a mistake. Let me explain:
Most of us know that the biggest risk to democracy in the United States, and perhaps globally, is a Trumpist Republican Party. We also know that once Trump was deprived of his megaphone, which he used to get his messages out to his base, his broad reach largely dried up. Trump, deprived of his Twitter megaphone, has gone dormant, and he has so far been unable to develop a social media platform with anywhere near the reach of Twitter. There is no other medium better designed for the dissemination of a short-and-sweet message intended for a particular audience, all while, and this is key, maximizing airtime in the mainstream media. There is no better example of this than Trump, and the fact that every attempted alternative social media startup had failed spectacularly, mostly because they weren’t able to get the broad public buy-in that Twitter has. Note that while the media reports on Trump's various comments, they never stick with it or obsess over it in the same way that they do about his tweets; DJT's tweets reach the world because Twitter has been legitimized in the broader public’s mind as a moderately reliable source for information. Without Twitter, Trump’s global reach evaporated overnight.
Put bluntly, Musk's purchase of Twitter, and the near certain reinstatement of Trump's Twitter account in the name of ‘free speech' is a legal, 45 billion dollar contribution to Donald Trump's 2021 Presidential election campaign. If, by some miracle, Trump is not the GOP nominee - DeSantis/Cruz ticket anyone?- this purchase all but assures the candidate and likely Presidential ‘winner' that they will not have their megaphone ripped away from them for the benefit of democracy.
Why?
The action on Twitter is primarily in journalism, academia, and politics, which is not necessarily where the users are. Because journalists rely so heavily on the medium, a LOT of stories in the mainstream print media are just 500-2000 word expansions on a couple of tweets, often solicited by journalists looking for ready-made stories. Journalists crowdsource stories on Twitter all the time. As an activist, writer, and professional communicator, I've learned that my best chance at getting a journalist to bite on any story I'm pitching is to get their attention on Twitter.
If I can communicate my perspective in less than 280 characters, I'm ready-made to be consumed by increasingly ‘lean and efficient’ media conglomerates which syndicate locally, nationally and internationally in sound bites. I'm also saying little enough that, with a little extra commentary, I can be made to say something else altogether, with little control over the repurcussions.
My point isn't that Twitter is useful for the general user. It's actually not all that useful - your feed is old before you've finished reading 25 tweets, the bots and trolls drown out good conversations, and Twitter often feels like shouting into the void. It commands the smallest percentage of power users across all of the major social media networks, and, as my friend pointed out, its user metrics are way down. My point, though, is that mainstream journalists use Twitter as a primary source of news stories. That is to say that human interest stories in the Toronto Star, in the Globe and Mail, in the National Post, almost all stories about social justice, tips about crimes that are currently ongoing, and videos like Ahmaud Arbery's death, they are all sourced primarily from Twitter. I don't even need to go into the usefulness of the network throughout the war in Ukraine - you can see my curated feed of experts here.
All of this is to say that when you and I pick up our Waterloo Region Record and read stories syndicated from Torstar, we are doing nothing more than reading tweets turned into words that resonate better with the general public. We may not know that we are consuming Twitter, that we're active on Twitter, that we're engaged on Twitter, but we are, simply because we're engaged with the journalists who provide us with our news.
This is not a knock on those journalists, to be clear. Editors are requiring more content out of young journalists, who are usually compensating for the slashing of resources in the newsroom, often as a result of staffing cuts. When you've got 5 stories to file before deadline, there is no time to go on a deep dive for sources. Burnout is rampant, as older, more seasoned journalists accept buyout packages, taking their story-sniffing skills and long-curated source networks out the door with them. So, when you have a pipeline of focused information, like Twitter, at your disposal, it only makes sense to use it to curate what stories you take on and what stories you don’t.
The value of Twitter is therefore not in its direct user base. It's in its effective use of psychology in the dissemination of information. After all, our brains are better able to manage bite-sized chunks of information, in order to aid in processing and contextualizing the new information. Just like other human beings, journalists follow the path of least resistance. If you can source your story in 20 minutes on Twitter, then you can get to your next assignment faster and generate more clicks for your stories - to your editor, without clicks, you're just another dime-a-dozen kitchen table blogger, magically out of a job the moment the next batch of unpaid interns arrives. C(r)apitalism wins again.
So why does Elon Musk want Twitter bad enough that he's willing to liquidate 1/5 of his total net worth to get it, while blowing off world hunger? He's not interested in Free Speech, no, not at all. Once Musk completes his purchase of Twitter, the two richest men in the world will control the global flow of information and goods in the west, which is precisely what is needed to circumvent democratic norms.
Buying Twitter isn't about a social network. It's about controlling information management, dissemination, and distribution and, ultimately, about controlling and managing the democratic process.
If you control Twitter, you can control information flow at its source. That's why, to Musk, it's worth far more than the 45 billion dollars he says he's going to spend on it.
Democracy is in danger around the world. Is anyone listening?
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