Twitter May Be Elon Musk's Shiny New Toy, but Free Speech Will Be His Waterloo
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Mr. Musk. Here's why Twitter is going to eat you alive.
In a previous Cappuccino, I had some choice things to say about Musk, none of them positive. When there are no limits to what the world’s richest man can do, buy, or say, we should worry.
Because decency has increasingly lost its center and now finds its neck on the chopping block of the obscenely wealthy, it was recently announced that Elon Musk is not only Twitter’s largest shareholder (surprise!), he’s also its de facto new owner. Apparently, 44 billion dollars hit Twitter shareholders’ sweet spot.
All hail our Dark Lord.
Trust me when I tell you that it’s only a matter of days, if not hours, before Donald Trump is reinstated by Musk, the world’s most starry-eyed champion of the First Amendment. “I’m a free speech absolutist,” Musk once said of himself. While pretending saliva wasn’t dripping from his mouth, Trump told reporters he wouldn’t return to Twitter, even if he were invited. But that’s a lie, of course, just like the other 30,573 times he lied, according to the fact checkers at the Washington Post. Yes, that’s the actual number.
His demurrals might have been more believable had the rollout of Trump’s own social media platform, Truth Social, not been such an embarrassing failure. Even now, weeks after its launch, the app is hemorrhaging users. “Glitchy and twitchy” is how Truth Social has been described, which makes me wonder if Trump forgot to pay his tech developers like he forgets to pay almost everyone else who works for him.
Expect Truth Social to go the way of other failed Trump businesses, such as Trump Steaks, GoTrump, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump: The Game, Trump Magazine, Trump University, Trump Ice, The New Jersey Generals, Tour de Trump, Trump Network, Trump!, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Castle, Trump Plaza Casinos, Trump Plaza Hotel, Trump Hotels & Casinos Resorts, and Trump Entertainment Resorts. The man has made a cottage industry out of failing upward. He’s P.T. Barnum in a floppy red tie. But those who remain on Twitter are going to be hearing a lot more from him in the coming weeks, so I hope they double up on their Xanax.
In case you’re curious, both Harris and Gallup polls have Trump winning against Biden, were the presidential election held today. Good to know he’ll have a megaphone like Twitter to shout more of his signature nonsense about “fake elections” and “fake news” and “Hunter Biden/Hillary Clinton/fill-in-the-blank.”
Since Musk’s announcement, Twitter has already begun its civil discourse devolution. QAnon conspiracists and MAGAts have come stampeding back to the platform. Twitter accounts on the left saw a sizable percentage of their followers disappear overnight. Folks like me who could see what was coming instantly deleted their accounts. But rightwing Twitter started gaining, leaving glistening chunks of red meat everywhere for the likes of Piers Morgan, Ben Shapiro, and Alex Jones to gobble up.
Tell me again how Trump isn’t going to return to Twitter in a blaze of Covfefe.
Musk is loving every minute of it, of course. Now that he’s taking Twitter private, the world won’t be answering to any pesky Board of Directors anymore. It will answer to him. Here is a man who was born into massive wealth. He managed to create massive wealth. And he now has control of the mic. Articles promoting cryptocurrency (Musk loves crypto) will be given preference over tiresome warnings about how this unregulated and unregulatable tool of the Black Market is going to plunge us all into a global Depression. He will also welcome paeons of joy to the wonders of Artificial Intelligence, which will effectively put everyone out of a job. Unless Musk wants to start sharing some of those billions, those jobless folks are going to get hungry.
But Mr. Free Speech Absolutist is about to learn some very hard truths regarding the nature of free speech, particularly that found on social media. Not all of it is glorious. Neo-Nazi propaganda is free speech. Vaccine misinformation is free speech. Pedophilia is free speech. Russian-generated election subversion is free speech. Stolen nude photos of female celebrities is free speech. Racial hatred is free speech. Jokes about raping women is free speech. Vitriol about the LGBTQ community is free speech. Hoaxes, cyberbullying, and Internet pranks are free speech. Defamation and slander are free speech.
If Musk thinks people are “smart enough to figure things out for themselves,” he’s gravely mistaken. Human history has proven just how gullible we are. We don’t see the world as the world is; we see the world as we are. Our lives are spent in a never-ending cycle of confirmation bias, e.g., people are awful, and oh look, Google has 2 million examples of why that’s true.
What’s going to happen, of course (frankly, I’m actually looking forward to it) is that Musk is going to have to make some tough decisions. And the minute Mr. Free Speech Absolutist draws a line in the sand, his merry band of crypto-nihilists are going to howl for his blood. They like Musk for the same reasons MAGAts like Trump: he’s just like they are, which is to say immature, petty, and in it for what he can get.
With great power comes great responsibility, which is something that Musk has managed to avoid for most of his life. How responsible was it to name his most recent child (he has nine, by the way) “X Æ A-12?” Twitter is going to teach him a lesson that neither he nor we will ever forget.
Making blanket statements involving the term “absolutist” is shockingly un-nuanced thinking from a man who purports to be a genius. There is a difference between free speech and ethical speech, as he’s about to discover. Free speech is in a constant state of development and evolution. As philosopher Karl Popper said on the paradox of tolerance, “Unlimited tolerance [Musk’s “free speech absolutism”] must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Will Twitter become a failed experiment? Most assuredly. But not before it has done considerable damage to all of us. It is not an exaggeration to say that the fate of democracy itself hung in the balance of Twitter’s decision to sell to Musk. And if you’re wondering why they did something so monumentally stupid, here’s why.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who stepped down as CEO late last year, will get a $978 million cash payout.
CEO Parag Agrawal, who succeeded Dorsey late last year, will get a $39 million cash payout.
Twitter execs will also rake in millions.
If Twitter were the public utility it should be, none of this would have happened. Democracy would have survived to live another day. But I’m afraid we are the cusp of a very dark period in American history. The wealthiest among us are consolidating untold amounts of power. In medieval Europe, that was one thing. But now, when literally anything or anyone can be had with a click of a button, only the gods know where that will lead.
It’s not looking good.
For any of us.
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Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
"I’m a free speech absolutist." What utter bullshit. Musk tolerates speech he approves of. That which he does not, he lashes out against. And, since he makes $16,000,000/hour, he can afford to do a lot of lashing out.
A public utility like Twitter- for that's what it's become- to be controlled by one man is the very definition of dangerous. I'm actually glad I was permanently suspended by Twitter a couple of months ago (you don't want to know the uber-fucking-stupid reason why); it saved me the effort of deleting my account now.
I don't have a crystal ball, but I believe that what once could have a useful digital town hall is about to degrade into a dog-eat-dog free-for-all. I will not miss it. Not one little bit.
The graphic on the "paradox" of tolerance is a good one. But it really isn't a "paradox" in the technical sense. Rather, the paradox -- the logical self-contradiction -- is in requiring a position like generic "tolerance" to be passively accepting of its own annihilation. John Dewey, as anti-authoritarian a socialist as you could ever find, threw the communists out of the massive meeting that created the New York Teacher's Union because the communists were determined to not allow anyone else speak.
I am reminded of this article:
"Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight"
-- Aleksandar Hemon,
https://lithub.com/fascism-is-not-an-idea-to-be-debated-its-a-set-of-actions-to-fight/
I might actually go back to Twitter to see if my lifetime ban still holds. If they let me in, I can test those "free speech" limits for myself. (But they won't let me back in, even after they allow Mango Mussolini back in on his golden toilet.)