Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter The man loves Twitter. He tweets as if he had been raised by the blue bird and the fail whale.
.......... Musk, Time’s 2021 person of the year ........ So what is Twitter built to do? It’s built to gamify conversation. ........ it does that “by offering immediate, vivid and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success. ........ these gamelike features are responsible for much of Twitter’s psychological wallop. Twitter is addictive, in part, because it feels so good to watch those numbers go up and up.” ........ games are pleasurable in part because they simplify the complexity of life. They render the rules clear, the score visible. ........ Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values that we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets. Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. ........ We become what the game wants us to be, or we lose. And that’s what’s happening to some of the most important people and industries and conversations on the planet right now. ........ Many of Twitter’s power users are political, media, entertainment and technology elites. They — we! — are particularly susceptible to a gamified discourse on the topics we obsess over. It’s hard to make political change. It’s hard to create great journalism. It’s hard to fill the ever-yawning need for validation. It’s hard to dent the arc of technological progress. Twitter offers the instant, constant simulation of doing exactly that. The feedback is immediate. The opportunities are infinite. ........ Twitter is a power drill, or at least it feels like one. ......... To log off is to miss much that matters, in industries where knowing what matters is essential. ......... It shapes real life by shaping what the media covers. ........ Attention is currency, and Twitter is the most important market for attention that there is. ......... There is a reason that Donald Trump, with his preternatural gift for making people look at him, was Twitter’s most natural and successful user. And he shows how the platform can shape the lives of those who never use it. From 2017 to 2021, the White House was occupied by what was, in effect, a Twitter account with a cardiovascular system, and the whole world bore the consequences. ........... He co-founded OpenAI, the most public-spirited of the big artificial intelligence shops. ....... Much of this has been built on the back of public subsidies, government contracts, loan guarantees and tax credits ....... He’s the best argument in the modern era that the government and the private sector can do together what neither can achieve apart. ........ A platform that heaps rewards on those who behave cruelly, or even just recklessly, is a dangerous thing. ......... Twitter rewards decent people for acting indecently. ......... “Bill Gates = boner killer” is a viral hit. The easiest way to rack up points is to worsen the discourse. ....... He’s proposed an edit button, an open-source algorithm, cracking down on bots and doing … something … to secure free speech. ....... Musk “will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.” ......... Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it. You shall know him by his tweets. He wants it to be what it is, or even more anarchic than that. ......... What will it be like to work at Twitter when the boss is using his account to go to war with the Securities and Exchange Commission or fight a tax bill he dislikes? Unless Musk changes his behavior radically, and implausibly, I suspect his ownership will heighten Twitter’s contradictions to an unbearable level. What would follow isn’t the collapse of the platform but the right-sizing of its influence. ........... Musk is already Twitter’s ultimate player. Now he’s buying the arcade. Everything people love or hate about it will become his fault. Everything he does that people love or hate will be held against the platform. He will be Twitter. He will have won the game. And nothing loses its luster quite like a game that has been beaten. .
Musk’s Twitter: Weed Memes. Editable Tweets. And the Return of Trump. The honest answer when it comes to Musk — superhero to some, supervillain to others — is, “Who knows?” ....... Editable tweets? Very likely. Fewer spam bots? Maybe. Twitter’s comely San Francisco headquarters building as a homeless shelter? Doubtful. An end of 4/20 weed jokes? Hard no. The man just negotiated a complex financial transaction that began with a built-in marijuana wisecrack. ........... The soon-to-be social media honcho is inclined to lift the permanent tweeting ban imposed last year on Donald Trump. ....... He’d already made clear that he is sympathetic to the notion, long before this deal. ........ When Twitter finally did toss Trump off the platform in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol for inciting violence (after many years of Twitter turning the other cheek to a bevy of lesser violations), Musk took issue with the decision. ......... Make no mistake about how valuable Trump has been to Twitter, or how dependent the former president was on the platform to reach his base. It was the central font for his repeated lies, but also a testing ground for his thinking about matters of global significance, musings that other presidents have conducted in private. It’s hard to imagine Trumpism, as it’s understood today, without Twitter or Twitter without Trumpism, ban or no. ......... In a twist, Trump told Fox News on Monday that he would not return to Twitter, even if allowed. “I am going to stay in Truth,” he said, referring to the moribund Truth Social site he pushed out. It’s a sad violin of a site
, with technologists fleeing the premises as fast as the app drops on the download charts. A business even less impressive than Trump Steaks or Trump water, or Trump University — now that’s really saying something. .......... a free speech-touting Twitter will probably run Truth Social and the others out of business. ........ and did I mention how much the kids love TikTok? ...... My suggestion is to make a strong ally of Twitter co-founder and recently departed C.E.O. Jack Dorsey, who was sidelined by activist investors. .
Elon Musk Is a Problem Masquerading as a Solution
Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of dubious claims, whether putting out misleading financial information or calling the British diver who helped rescue trapped schoolboys in Thailand a “pedo guy.” ......... Twitter has a racism problem. Time and again, it has failed to consequentially answer the pleas of users of color to address the bigotry and harassment that are endemic for them. ........ The agency recently described one of Tesla’s plants as “a racially segregated workplace” rife with slurs as well as discrimination “in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion.” ........ Twitter has a bullying and harassment problem, and the subtler but related challenge of bringing out the worst, not the best, in all of us. ......... Though you might think that having more than $250 billion, according to Forbes, and wanting to solve the problems of Earth and space would fully occupy someone, he seems to have a compulsive need to belittle people and burp out his least-considered impulses and stoke bullying by his legions of admirers in a way that both reflects and shapes how Twitter is. ......... The arsonists routinely cosplay as firefighters.
........ Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (nรฉ Facebook) was as responsible as any American for letting hate speech and disinformation run amok on his platforms in the run-up to the 2020 elections, only to donate — with his wife, Priscilla Chan — $300 million to help secure that election from the forces he had helped unleash. Google, having helped shred local news gathering around the country with its massive market power in online advertising, turned around and promised to donate $15 million to the Support Local News campaign. ......... and engaging in the troll baiting that can be a powerful means of making journalists and other interrogators and critics fear the mob pile-ons that could result from writing critically about his interests. ........ In his vision, what we may, with help from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, call negative freedom of speech, the freedom to speak without restraint by powerful authorities, is the only freedom of speech. And so freeing Nazis to Nazi, misogynists to bully and harass and doxx and brigade women, even former president Donald Trump to possibly get his Twitter account back — this cutting of restraints becomes the whole of the project. ........ there is also what we may call positive freedom of speech: affirmative steps to create conditions that allow all people to feel and be free to say what they think. ........ Legally speaking, all American women or people of color or both who were ever talked over in a meeting or denied a book contract or not hired to give their opinion on television enjoy the protections of the First Amendment. The constitutional protection of speech does not, on its own, engender a society in which the chance to be heard is truly abundant and free and equitably distributed. ......... When it comes to speech, what has often kept a great many people from speaking isn’t censorship but the lack of a platform. ........ when it became a cesspit of hate and harassment for women and people of color in particular, it began to offer a miserable bargain: You can be free to say what you wish, but your life can be made unrelentingly painful if you so dare. ......... The “censorship” that Mr. Musk performatively deplores consists of efforts to rectify these very real problems of harassment and abuse. Twitter has taken modest but wildly inadequate steps to improve safety on the platform. ....... positive freedom of speech — the creation of a safe and non-life-ruining environment for the airing of thoughts. ........ in a moment of proto-fascism on the political right, his priority seems to be to undam the flood of bile and bigotry and bullying and disinformation. ....... The country already faces the very real prospect, starting at noon on Jan. 20, 2025, of a descent toward racist authoritarianism and a protracted slide away from liberal democracy. If your idea of what the country needs in this moment is less clamping down on hate and lies and more rightists gone wild, whew. ......... The plutocrats have already rigged the economy. That’s just the first step. Then you take some of the spoils and reinvest it in buying even more political influence, so that political inequality can help keep economic inequality yawning. You buy up media or social media platforms and thus can help rig the discourse in your favor, taking control of the tools used by regular people to fight back. You venture, as Mr. Musk did, to a TED conference and, without much pushback, brand yourself as a kind of public intellectual, a thought leader, a visionary, and thereby in many people’s minds you became a sage, not a robber baron. ......... We’re going to have to legislate real guardrails — perhaps like those created by the European Union’s Digital Services Act — on social media platforms that are too big to entrust democracy to. We’re going to have to build nonprofit alternatives to the platforms and see if they can become meaningful venues. ......... a society that outsources the tending of its social interactions to people who behave like sociopaths is a society asking not for freedom but for tyranny. .
