“Fix your companies. Or Congress will.”
That was the juicy clapback that reverberated across the hallowed halls of Twitter when United States (US) Senator Ed Markey struck back at Tesla billionaire and new-found owner of Twitter, Elon Musk. The little tiff entertained Twitter users across the globe after the Washington Post successfully impersonated the politician by paying for a verified account in his name under Musk’s new “Twitter Blue” system.
It’s the uninhibited drama like this that makes Twitter my favourite news source for a peek into the scandalous lives of the global elite. For the better part of a long and tumultuous decade, Twitter has hit the sweet spot of the social media trifecta for me — part gratuitous meme-factory machine, part online journal platform for my oversharing tendencies, and lastly, part serious direct line to the world’s movers and shakers. Twitter has always had a knack for taking the serious side of life, yet somehow making it fun. None of the visual aesthetics of other platforms; just good old short snappy tweets.
We watched Nancy Pelosi tear up her copy of then-President Donald Trump’s Union address on repeat as it flooded our timelines. We felt the goosebumps sweep across the little hairs on our forearms as flames burning down the Notre Dame lit up our screens in real time. Come to think of it, we even got to watch the community come together to sniff out the adulterous affair of a Try Guy like one big audition for a position at the FBI.
But, Twitter as we know it will probably never be the same again.
No, it won’t die the way the hordes have been predicting every other day on the timeline since Musk first carried his own sink into the Twitter office. However, that little ick you get as your nose crinkles and your mouth folds into a frown while you scroll the app? That’s the stench of good old reliable political Twitter dying in a Silicon Valley plastic ditch.
So let’s take a deep dive (or as Twitter likes to call it — a thread) into what Musk has changed in a month as CEO, what it means for the way we receive political narratives, and ultimately how we see the world.
(1/4) The Acquisition:
In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, you might have missed out on the fact that social media mainstay Twitter was acquired by Tesla owner Elon Musk earlier this year. The drawn-out acquisition started in January when Musk began investing in the platform, before making an official offer in April to purchase the company at US$54.20 (S$74.43) per share, valuing the company at roughly US$43 billion (S$59.05 billion).
In a quote from his exchange with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk says that he believed in “[Twitter’s] potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe”, making the acquisition a reasonable move for Musk since he believes that free speech is a “societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”
It would be unlike him to partake in anything without dishing us a side of drama and theatrics, so it seemed only natural that the plot thickened with a class-action lawsuit against the billionaire by Twitter shareholders for alleged stock manipulation throughout his will-he-or-will-he-not buy the company performance. The lawsuit based in Delaware court set a hard deadline on Musk’s attempt to withdraw from the signed purchase agreement over proposed concerns of bots on the platform and its implications for free speech.
But of course, Musk had his ways. Twitter users woke up to photos of Musk’s official take-over in late October, with the billionaire live-tweeting his entrance into the building as its new CEO and owner. What would follow would be weeks of chaos, massive organisational changes and messy fumbles as the app tries to find its footing along its new path.
(2/4) Updates in the Name of Free Speech:
Within days, Musk let go of nearly half the global workforce: roughly 3,700 jobs including high level management and key developers. Restructuring is commonplace after most mergers and acquisitions, but the sheer volume of staff retrenched, as well as the gravity of specific key management roles let go, made for amazing cannon fodder backlash on the app.
To his credit, Musk seemingly held true to his vision of free speech by immediately making a few key changes to the app: monetising the verification tick, reinstating previously banned accounts, and revising new community guidelines on moderation and free speech.
However, his attempt to “improve” the verification tick system on Twitter was the start down a very slippery slope that led to a very ticked off Senator Markey along the way. While previously verified accounts were moderated by an internal Twitter team who accredited the user’s public status, Twitter accounts can now simply purchase a verification stamp of approval for US$8 (S$10.99).
Hoping that changing the verification to a paid subscription would increase profits alongside traditional advertising, this implementation that fell in line with his libertarian ideals of free speech for all initially sounded like a good idea (to him, at least).
Musk also called upon the public to vote on the decision to reinstate permanently banned accounts. Twitter collectively clutched their pearls watching banned accounts come back to life, from Kathy Griffin, Jordan Peterson, freshly banned Andrew Tate, to the notoriously controversial account of former US President Donald J. Trump.
In theory, the devil’s advocate could argue that the revival of these prolific hard-right accounts would actually do more to ensure equal freedom of speech. Of the 1 in 5 US adults that use Twitter, 32 per cent of users identify as Democrats as opposed to the 17 per cent that are Republicans. In the grand scheme of things, the app could afford to have more differing voices all around.
Lastly, Musk has spent the last month reworking Twitter’s community guidelines to encapsulate his vision as a free speech absolutist. The final form of this free speech policy has yet to be seen, with Musk intending to announce a brand new moderation council to oversee content and user censorship guidelines that he says will continue to evolve as they find best practices for the everchanging Twitter landscape.
(3/4) The Dismal (but Juicy) Fallout: Credibility in Political Media
Like a loyal fan base waiting for another dramatic episode of the Twitter Saga each week, it’s highly likely this unsolicited op-ed might become old news within minutes of going live. Even as I channel my best Morgan Freeman voice and put pen to paper, segments have been violently scratched out in red ink and tossed in the paper bin as my phone beeps with brand new Twitter updates.
And the updates so far have not been good.
Musk is set to announce the rework of the Twitter Blue verification system and new moderation council within the next few weeks. Whatever they may be, his moderation policies encouraging greater freedom of speech looks to face some bumpy hurdles in their debut, having caught the wandering eye of the European Union watchdog for the region’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) issued Twitter with a warning on behalf of the EU after reports that its Data Protection Officer had resigned, with other sources also reporting that the Twitter Child Safety department responsible for flagging underaged sexual content has dwindled down to a single lone ranger on the global team.
Musk has also found himself in a brand new squabble with Apple over censorship and app fees after the latter warned that they could remove Twitter from the App Store. As far as we’re keeping score, that’s 3 vs 1 with Twitter down in the fight for this new censorship regime.
What could make or break that new moderation council lies in the parameters that they set for what is considered hate speech. Musk ran a Twitter poll to crowdsource an opinion on whether to unban accounts as long as “they have not broken the law”. Call him a modern-day John Stuart Mill if you will, given his weird take on the Harm Principle, but where do you draw the line between allowing hateful freedom of speech, and preventing actual physical consequences?
Musk seems to have forgotten that Twitter previously banned Trump’s account after concluding that his tweets violated the “Glorification of Violence” policy during the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection— a clear example that freedom of speech without explicit calls to action can still influence real life scenarios.
Instead, he seems to be enjoying his time being caught up with his idealistic, utopian view that Twitter will protect freedom of speech by controlling freedom of reach. “You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out,” he says. Not to burst his bubble, but the efficacy of that model is debatable. Even in the current “controlled” freedom of reach in the Twitter landscape, people can still, and already do, actively seek out their interests on social media. The searching for hashtags and voices that appeal to their cognitive bias pulls them deeper into the quicksand of something much scarier — the selection bias echo chamber.
Media malaise theories explore how communication channels can undermine politics through instigated online clashes in ideology that often sensationalise conversations as opposed to prioritising systematic analysis due to an inherent lack of moderation.
So if you’re free to search for opinions that you’ve already fallen hook, line and sinker for, how can freedom of speech exist independently from freedom of reach? How do we prevent the voluntary sourcing of misinformation that might spark violence?
Not to mention, Twitter has proven to be a powerful tool for political agendas, allowing like-minded individuals to self-organise and coordinate underground movements. That quality can be a torrential force for good or evil depending which hands it falls into, so will Musk and his privatised Twitter be held accountable should online conversations unwittingly explode into violence and public unrest?
Senator Ed Markey might have a few words to say, but so would pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, who is estimated to lose roughly US$15 billion (S$20.60 billion) after a fake account with the paid Twitter Blue verification tick tweeted that insulin would now be provided by “Eli Lilly” for free.
This critical lapse in app security ultimately led the Twitter Blue launch to be reversed almost immediately after it was launched in five regions, which was probably for the best since it lowers the risk of unwittingly tampering with various ongoing elections using fake news and an accredited spread of misinformation.
The early mistakes of Twitter Blue have shown that the lack of moderators curating the feed in a structured system leaves the public space vulnerable to dangerous rhetorics and even malicious misinformation. For almost two decades, the free blue tick has served users by identifying and legitimising voices on the timeline. With no discernable accreditation process for verification thus far, what then becomes the point of the tick if it is openly available for everyone?
(4/4) My Formal Disclaimer
For the internet record, this is not an Elon Musk hate train.
Despite the exhaustive list of complaints I’ve shared about the Musky changes to the bird app (see what I did there?), at the end of the day I’m going to continue being a loyal fan, and probably won’t see myself leaving the platform any time soon.
What was the point of this lengthy soliloquy you ask? The short answer — Elon’s Twitter scares me.
Instagram has had its share of controversy with its focus on peer-to-peer validation through likes that has been linked to mental health issues within the younger generation. Mark Zuckerberg has had to testify before congress for lapses in data security that potentially affected the 2016 US Elections. Traditional media has been skewed for centuries, long enough for us to place different publishers across the scale of a media bias chart.
But Elon’s Twitter stands on the cusp of something that could be a monumental catalyst for global politics in the years to come. Media often plays an important role as the driver of societal change, spreading political narratives across communities via radio, television and social media, similar to Daniel Lerner’s modernisation theory.
Twitter, of all platforms, could be the gunpowder that explodes in all the wrong places. Users post on Instagram and Tiktok to share their stories, while politicians, journalists, and quite honestly anyone with some skin in the game tweets to connect. We have been given front row seats to the Elon Musk show as he tweets his every thought and deliberation for his followers to see, a trait of Twitter that blurs the lines of traditional and digitised media — a platform owned by the elite, but still made by the masses. It’s almost ironic that Musk enjoys the spotlight the platform has given his voice, while also almost entirely diluting that same essence of Twitter within a month by exposing it to those that mean harm.
What can we expect to see in a space for political voices as we embrace freedom of speech, minimally moderated by libertarian community guidelines, and without a proper process of accreditation to hold online content accountable to the legitimacy of their posts? With divisive world events such as the debate on Western morals against alleged Qatari human rights violations during the World Cup, and even the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war that has been a battle online as much as on the ground, how do we maintain a conducive environment for harmonious global discourse as we weave through intricate and complex issues on a daily basis?
Fake news is not a new concept to most millennials and Gen Z youths, but as Musk continues to brainstorm his next steps, there’s a high chance that the public would have to diversify and return to traditional media news outlets to get their facts right while the new moderation council irons out the kinks.
As your friendly neighbourhood social media addict, here’s a kind link to a media bias chart (and how it works) so you can pick one and pay for a physical newspaper for the first time. I’ve got a nagging feeling you might need it while Musk works to reinstate effective community guidelines before too much damage is done.
In the meantime I’ll stick to scrolling Twitter for the other less-world altering good stuff — repurposed Vine memes and a blow-by-blow Cliffs Notes of the White Lotus and Euphoria. It might take a while for Elon to hit the sweet spot between freedom of speech and effective levels of libertarian censorship, so here’s the bottom line I hope he doesn’t miss.
Don’t compromise (read: monetise) the legitimisation of voices. Everything else is fair game.
