All of Twitter is all atwitter over the Twitter files. The right is sure they’ve uncovered a conspiracy to suppress Constitutionally protected free speech. The left believes the moderation that the so-called Twitter files are highlighting was mostly justified. The rest of the world could not care less.
Like Trump, Musk has discovered a platform where he can express his narcissism and nurture his grievance over being aggrieved. Also like Trump, he’s engaging his savior complex by standing up for the little people and taking on the powerful interest that’s oppressing them. The little folks he’s defending are mainly people who want to be able spout their racist resentment or call for social and political upheaval. Musk is defending their rights to be assholes so he bought the platform for far more than it’s worth. And they are fawning over their new billionaire redeemer, another false idol for the faithful.
To expose the evil of the previous owners, Musk has hired journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss to produce Tweet storms that layout how Twitter employees suppressed the voices of mainly conservative activists. Taibbi admitted that Musk put conditions on his Tweet storm that he couldn’t reveal. One of those conditions is clearly that he and Weiss could not use a platform designed for journalism and had to stick to the 280 characters of Twitter. The other conditions are secret so Musk’s exercise in transparency has transparency problems.
I haven’t had the patience to get through one of the Tweet storms yet. Reading a somewhat in depth article in 280-character bite-sized chunks is clunky and annoying so I’m relying mainly on snippets and what other people say about it. I guess Musk is reinventing serializing to keep his readers coming back.
The right believes they’ve discovered a major scandal. To hear them tell it, Twitter has violated their First Amendment rights and they want the American people to see how they’ve been wronged. They are sure people who’ve never spent much time on Twitter, about 70% of the country, are going to care.
They are also just flat out wrong. Unless I’ve missed something, Musk, Taibbi, and Weiss are not accusing the government of suppressing anyone’s speech. They say that a private company, Twitter, restricted who can say what on its platform. That may sound distasteful, but it’s also ridiculously common. Newspapers routinely reject guest op-eds and letters-to-the-editor that they find offensive. Fox News is certainly not going to give an evening show to Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart and they probably wouldn’t even have them as guests on one of their programs like Fox and Friends because they aren’t friends.
Conservatives argue that Twitter is the equivalent of the modern public square. It’s not. Public squares are owned by the public, not private companies. A better analogy is that Twitter is like a huge shopping mall where most stores are selling ideas and opinions and the currency is shares and likes. People are wandering around the mall saying all sorts of things. Most of it is just ignored by the people who own the mall, but, if you start yelling “N, N, N!” the mall cops are going to shut you down. The mall cops aren’t police. They aren’t going to arrest you. They are just going to tell you to take that nonsense over to Gab or Parler. The mall cops are private security, just like Twitter employees are paid by the site, not the government.
If accounts start encouraging people to take actions that are harmful to other people, those mall cops are probably going to report them to management and management will determine whether or not to shut them down. Sometimes, the managers might tell the mall cops to keep an eye on the rabble rousers or turn down their megaphone. Or they might deter them from entering certain parts of the mall so fewer people hear whatever gibberish they’re spouting.
A few folks may have very large megaphones and the attention of a lot of people who respect them. If those folks start telling their followers to do things that are harmful to people or institutions outside of the mall, the mall has the right to throw them out. We can argue whether they should or not, but the mall has the right to expel them, especially if the mall cops have given them several warnings. That’s not a violation of anybody’s rights. Those accounts are in violation of the company’s policies.
If Twitter is guilty of anything, it’s misrepresenting how much speech they would tolerate and lying, either directly or through omission, about which accounts they were censoring or restricting. They did nothing illegal. They attempted to stop communication that they believed was disinformation about COVID, vaccines, election fraud and other matters. The tried to thwart accounts that were abusive, racist, antisemitic, and homophobic. With over 330 million monthly users, they almost certainly got it wrong sometimes.
Right-wingers got banned more than left-wingers since the right has decided to tolerate racism and bigotry in its ranks. Conservative accounts were also spreading The Big Lie. That doesn’t mean Twitter was trying to help Democrats, as so many conservatives have complained. But if they were, that’s not illegal, either.
As an article in the libertarian magazine Reason says, “As a private company, Twitter was obviously within its rights to do this, but users also have the right to be furious.” And conservatives are. But Twitter is just the latest target of their anger. They’re mad at NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN. They feel slighted by the New York Times, The Washington Post, News & Observer, Charlotte Observer, and virtually every other mainstream news outlet in America. The only news they trust comes from sites like Fox News or The Wall Street Journal whose opinion page will confirm their biases.
In buying Twitter, Musk joins billionaires like the Murdochs, Kochs, and Mercers who cater to the portion of the population that can be fooled all of the time and the grifters who milk them. He’s creating more outrage among the outraged. He’s hoping to somehow keep more of the traditional journalists and posters who make the site interesting while charging them fees to be heard. He’ll give you an edit button and check mark for $8 a month and if you don’t pay, your posts will get suppressed in the algorithm. In other words, Musk’s free speech cost money.
The risk for Musk is that people flee Twitter for something else. Twitter has built a unique space that has become the go-to site for sharing information among journalists, academics, activists, campaigns, and political leaders. It’s the site of choice for the most informed citizens. Musk is betting that they are too invested to move to another site and that Twitter is too integral to the current information ecosystem for them to leave. The key to his success is keeping those content providers involved while allowing the racists, xenophobes, homophobes, insurrectionists, and other misanthropes to return. If he’s left with nothing but right-wing cranks and grifters, he’s got little more than Gab or Parler.
So far, the Twitter Files have offered nothing surprising or illegal, despite what Musk might tweet. He’s just offered more outrage for the perpetually aggrieved. His cheerleaders come from both the far left and the far right who fundamentally believe that government or corporate America or somebody is trying to oppress them.
In reality, Twitter management has spent a decade trying to figure out how to manage a virtually unmanageable platform. Maybe they would have been better off allowing more obnoxious and inflammatory speech. Maybe they did the best they could, given the circumstances. Regardless, there’s no evidence, so far, that they did anything illegal. As we’ve seen with newspapers, television, radio, and any other platform, right-wingers will always feel aggrieved unless the management parrots their talking points and ideology. It’s not surprising they believe that Twitter has been biased against them and it’s not surprising that they believe a deep-pocketed billionaire will help promote their values.
Musk’s Twitter Files haven’t generated nearly the publicity he expected and the surprises have been few. He overhyped the release and produced the report in a virtually unreadable format — 280-character tweets. While a few folks on Twitter will engage in the drama and the right finds more evidence of their oppression by the media, the rest of the country will settle into the holiday season and forget this whole brouhaha ever happened.
I suspect Twitter is headed to a long, slow decline, not the rapid collapse that appeared likely a few weeks ago. Musk will try to keep the site focused on him while other platforms work to develop alternatives. Maybe he will find a formula that works, but that doesn’t really feel like where he’s heading. It feels more like he’s creating a space that’s safe for bullies and uncomfortable to everyone else.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Mills spent 20 years as a political and public affairs consultant. Republished from PoliticsNC.com.
