Apr 14, 2022 5:17 PM

Elon Musk Is Right About Twitter

It really is the closest thing we have to an online public square—and that's terrible for democracy. Let his takeover bid be a wakeup call.

The saga of Elon Musk attempting to take over Twitter began, appropriately, on Twitter. In late March, Musk tweeted, “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?”

We now know Musk’s answer. Not long after his tweet, an SEC filing revealed he had quietly become Twitter’s largest shareholder. And on Wednesday, he sent a letter to Twitter’s board chair declaring his intention to buy the company for about $43 billion and take it private. His goal, he wrote, is to help Twitter realize its “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.”

Musk was vague about what free speech means to him, but his moves appeared to be about loosening Twitter’s content moderation policies. In a live interview at this year’s TED conference on Thursday, he basically confirmed those suspicions. When asked whether a Musk-owned Twitter would prohibit any content, he replied, “I think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. There are some limitations on free speech in the US, and of course Twitter would have to abide by those.”

If this is really Musk’s plan, it’s terrible news. The First Amendment permits all kinds of horrible speech that most people don’t want to see in their social feeds. Allowing any legal speech would mean opening up Twitter to explicit racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, advocacy of violence, and worse. If this isn’t really his intent, his comments are still terrible news: It means he has spent close to zero time thinking seriously about free speech before attempting to buy Twitter in the name of free speech.

Musk is on firmer ground, however, when he calls Twitter a de facto public square. Not everyone thinks so. On my feed, at least, that claim has drawn a fair bit of mockery. Some people have pointed out that Twitter is a private company, not the government, and so can do what it wants. Others have argued that Twitter can’t be the public square because most of the public doesn’t even use it. Twitter is far smaller than other social platforms. It has only around 200 million daily active users worldwide and around 37 million in the US. Compare that to around 2 billion active users for Facebook and YouTube and more than a billion for TikTok. Nor does Twitter have the kind of quasi-governmental market power of the biggest tech giants. Meta’s current market cap is about $575 billion—a precipitous fall from last year, when it cleared $1 trillion, but still out of reach for even the world’s richest person. TikTok’s parent company has been valued at $250 billion. Next to those numbers, Twitter looks like small potatoes.

And yet Musk is onto something. A platform’s importance to democracy isn’t purely a function of its size or even its popularity. Twitter may not be the biggest social network, but, at least in the US, it’s the most politically significant. (This is probably less true internationally. The US remains Twitter’s biggest market.) Its relatively small user base is composed disproportionately of people who influence politics and culture. It’s where journalists, politicians, academics, and other “elites” spend tons of time. It’s where they get news and workshop their takes. It is, after all, where Musk—the world’s richest person—chooses to express himself. If you want to influence public opinion, you don’t post on Facebook. You tweet.

Consider the case of Jennifer Sey, the former Levi’s executive who lost both her job and a shot at becoming CEO because she refused to stop her outspoken advocacy for reopening public schools during the pandemic. I recently asked Sey why she didn’t simply refrain from tweeting. She told me that, first of all, she didn’t just tweet. She organized rallies and wrote op-eds. She appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to discuss her decision to move to Denver so her youngest child could enroll in in-person school. But Twitter was the killer app.

“That’s what enabled me to get invited to the mayor’s office,” she said of her tweets on the subject. “Twitter might not be the biggest social media platform, but it is where journalists are, it is where influencers are connecting with each other. So I was invited to conversations that I thought could make a difference. And that was because of Twitter. That doesn't happen on Facebook. The whole thing with Fox happened because of Twitter. I had tweeted that we were moving to Denver, I think Jake Tapper retweeted it, it got picked up. That doesn’t happen on other platforms.”

“Public square” may not be a perfect term for this, as the legal scholar Mary Anne Franks has written. But whatever you call it, it’s hard to deny that Twitter is the place to be if you want to be heard by people with power. This means access to Twitter has become an oddly crucial tool if you want to participate fully in democratic life—by most accounts, the reason the right to free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment.

This is extremely unhealthy. Treating Twitter as a gauge of public opinion leads political figures to take unpopular positions favored by loud online activists, accelerating political polarization. And it warps media organizations’ baseline sense of what people believe and care about. A comment that goes viral on Twitter might have tens of thousands of retweets. That looks like a lot but is actually a tiny, nonrepresentative sample of the population. (Plus, some unknown share of those retweets probably came from bot accounts.) Even if the user base looked more like society overall, Twitter is driven by an engagement-based algorithmic feed that rewards outrage, sensationalism, and virality, all in the service of selling ads—meaning what you see there is not the product of some organic deliberative process. Those same design features hack the brains of media and political elites, as well, too often leading them to behave like assholes in public in pursuit of attention and engagement.

Will any of this change if Musk’s hostile takeover succeeds? Probably not. During the TED interview, along with his suggestion about allowing all legal speech, Musk made the more sensible argument that Twitter’s ranking algorithms and enforcement decisions should be public and transparent. His stated view is that, given Twitter’s importance, “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”

But perhaps the real problem is that Twitter is so influential in the first place. Here, neither Twitter nor Musk is to blame. We journalists are. It’s the media’s fixation with Twitter that drives its political importance, because getting attention on Twitter is a shortcut to getting press attention, which all politicians—and some eccentric billionaires—covet.

How did we get here? Over the past decade, practically everyone in media came to feel that they had to be on Twitter. It seemed essential for promoting stories and reaching audiences. Over the years, this has grown into an unhealthy addiction for some individual journalists (guilty!) and the field at large. Reporters and editors often have a green light to waste time scrolling through social media during work hours, since one never knows when something important will appear in the feed. Whole stories are based on trends observed on Twitter. A viral tweet is used as evidence of popular sentiment. Some under-resourced newsrooms lean on Twitter feeds as a cheaper, faster substitute for deeper reporting. And some of us mistake Twitter engagement for journalistic impact—even though Twitter drives far fewer readers to stories than Facebook or Google search.

The good news is that there are some signs the profession is nearing a moment of clarity. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle has argued that the way to fix what Twitter has done to public discourse is “for major institutions in the media and think-tank world to tell their employees to get the hell off Twitter.” Recently, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet issued a memo to staff informing them that they are not required to have a Twitter presence and urging them to spend less time on the platform. That’s an important signal because unilaterally withdrawing from social media is not really an option for journalists lower down the totem pole.

Twitter’s board may not accept Musk’s bid. The fact that it’s even a possibility, however, is deeply alarming. One man shouldn’t have so much power over the public square. Luckily, there’s nothing inevitable about Twitter playing that role. Perhaps Musk’s takeover bid will prompt the media to rethink its dependence on a for-profit social platform that doesn’t necessarily have the public interest at heart. If that happens, Musk really will have followed through on his promise to strengthen democracy—just not in the way he imagined.