Elon Musk’s Twitter

I was an early user of Twitter – May 2007. It is not as fun as it used to be and there is a tremendous amount of noise, but it is a useful medium especially for news and commentary. Back during 2015 – 2016 during the explosion of popularity of neo-fascist and neo-Nazi Charlottesville-type accounts, it was heartening that Twitter began to moderate its platform to prevent threats of violence, m/disinformation and hate speech. While it was flawed and pockmarked with loopholes and poor enforcement, at least it existed.

Conservatives, whose current political ethos is partly reliant on feigned victimhood and grievance, naturally saw themselves as somehow a target of bans on hate speech, violent rhetoric, and other platform rules. Ordinarily, they would have relished the opportunity to prove how well markets work and set up a competing platform that did everything Twitter does, but with – I don’t know, more Nazis? First came Gab, the virulently anti-Semitic home of the Pittsburgh Synagogue mass murder. Then came Parler, which couldn’t figure out its own tech. Then came Gettr, which is a nothing, and then Truth Social, which Trump owns and is his platform of choice.

Shockingly, none of these Twitter alternatives ever caught fire and conservatives continue to whine incessantly about Twitter bans that they earned or “shadowbans” and other nonsense.

I harbor no illusions that the people who owned Twitter in the past were somehow paragons of virtue, or that the people who own any tech platform are better than anyone else, but I think that Elon Musk is nothing more than a modern-day Barnum. He’s invented very little but gotten very rich off of others’ work. He is a rich techbro who just wants to be loved and to be thought of as funny. He’s a fraud. His gigafactory in South Buffalo makes practically nothing and has done little except redistribute NY tax money to a private corporation. His cars may have done a lot to help usher in consumer acceptance of EVs, but because of his public antics I would never want to buy one. His repetition of Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda has eclipsed whatever good he did giving UA access to Starlink, his satellite-based internet service.

I realize that people are usually more complicated than some binary “good” or “evil”, but to the extent that my consumer choice and my dollar mirrors my values, I do not choose to give Elon Musk my money, no matter how good his product.

Turning then to Twitter, it is driven by advertisements, and the content is the product. That means every Twitter user was a @Jack product once, then a $TWTR product, but now is an Elon Musk product.

I didn’t feel strongly about Jack Dorsey or the Twitter board. But I don’t really want to be an Elon Musk product.

I’m sure he’s going to un-ban all the toxic banned accounts, and that will cause Twitter to devolve into something nastier than it already is or was. I don’t hold out a lot of hope about what it will become as a platform – whether it was fun or informative or intellectually interesting.

So, I probably won’t delete my account, per se – I’ve deleted all my old Tweets, however. I may delete the app from my devices. I had already greatly reduced my presence there over the last 2 years but I really don’t want to be Elon Musk’s product or part of some unfunny experiment of his. I do not see him as a force for good in the world any more than Peter Thiel or any other reflexively anti-woke, right-wing character. They’re all trying to out-Joe Rogan or out-Jordan Petersen each other.

A long time ago, I made the conscious decision to avoid talking-head cable news like I was allergic to it. News should be news and not a few think tankers and ex-pols yelling talking points at an anchor. I don’t care if it’s Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson – it is uninteresting to me. The local paper is a shadow of its former self. Twitter had been a good substitute for gaining information from myriad sources as it happened, and completely supplanted blogs and RSS feeds for me by about a decade ago.

I’m interested to find out what the next thing will be. More cat videos, I suppose.