The Scent of Musk
Why the Right Loves Twitter Again
After more than twelve years on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve come across a lot of poisonous sentiments that have often tested my faith in humanity, so it does take something unusual to make my jaw drop nowadays. Nevertheless it does still happen. About two weeks ago I checked out my local community Facebook Page - normally a relatively innocuous forum - on which someone had posted a photograph of a driver cutting up a cyclist as a generic warning against dangerous driving.
Nothing controversial about that message, you might think, but much to my amazement some commenters found it objectionable. So much so that one reader recommended that all cyclists should ‘be killed.’ Other readers joined in with their own variations on the evils of cyclists and the long-suffering motorist.
OK, not all cyclists behave well on the road, but killing them? When the original poster expressed his horror that anyone could suggest such a thing, the commenter who made that recommendation argued that free speech entitled him to say whatever he felt like saying.
Fortunately, the administrators didn’t agree, and removed his homicidal suggestion and all comments related to it, which the cyclist-hating commenter no doubt regarded as a violation of his rights.
I mention this in the light of Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter. As anyone who has anything to do with digital media knows, the founder of SpaceX and the inventor of the Tesla electric car is proposing to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
The takeover may not actually happen. There are some suggestions that Musk might not go actually ahead with it. But at the moment it seems that he is, and a lot of words have been written about why the world’s richest man wants to buy the microblogging and social networking service with approximately 290 million monthly users, and what might happen to the service if he does.
The New Yorker has a piece looking at whether Musk just enjoys Twitter, whether he wants to advance certain political and social goals, or whether he might see Twitter as a form of free advertising and brand enhancement for Tesla (the company doesn’t advertise, but Musk has an astonishing 87.6 million Twitter followers).
Musk himself has described the takeover as a kind of public service:
Not all these proposals are bad. Musk has since claimed that his proposed changes will make both the left and the right ‘unhappy’, and insisted that his real goal is to ‘maximise area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the -80% of people in the middle.’
Yet he still claims that he is ‘against censorship that goes far beyond the law’ and argues that ‘If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.’
Some of us have seen quite enough of rich men enacting the ‘will of the people’ in recent years, and that ‘therefore’ is doing an awful lot of work connecting Musk’s two propositions. Maybe the man who wants to widen the curve of happiness really does want us to enjoy ourselves in his playground:
But Musk’s intentions are one thing. The real significance of this takeover is not what may or may not be going on inside a billionaire’s head, but the fact that there are so many people endorsing his views on free speech on the VERY conservative or white nationalist-far right spectrum, some of whom inhabit that slushy zone where ‘conservative’ morphs into ‘far right’ without any obvious boundary between them.
Some of the cheerleaders waving pom poms as Musk circles over Jack Dorsey’s algorithm have had their accounts removed for breaching Twitter terms of service, and some of those who haven’t have begun posting names of people who have been removed, with the clear hope that Space Rocket Guy will be bringing them back to the platform
Here is Ann Coulter reeling off a list of names that perhaps one day, ought to be inscribed in stone in some martyr’s memorial somewhere up on Stone Mountain:
Let’s have a closer look at these free speech icons, shall we? The actor James Wood was locked out of his account for sharing an intimate photograph of someone without their consent. Steve Bannon was permanently suspended because he posted a video suggesting that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded. Tommy Robinson violated Twitter rules on ‘hateful conduct.’ Ditto Katie Hopkins. Al-right show pony Milo Yiannopoulos was banned, following numerous violations of Twitter service rules, for spearheading a bullying campaign against the black actor Leslie Jones, because she had the temerity to appear in Ghostbusters.
As Coulter would say, etc
Coulter doesn’t mention Donald Trump, who has fallen from the favour that she once bestowed on him, but we can pause to point out that the US president was suspended two days after the January 6 2021 assault on the Capitol because of ‘the risk of further incitement of violence.’
You might think that these suspensions mean that Twitter is doing a good job at regulating the service, but much of the time it hasn’t done a particularly good job at all. The only thing one can safely say is that it has done a better job than a billionaire who once called the British caver in the 2018 Thailand cave rescue team a ‘pedo-guy’ for no reason at all is likely to do.
Contrary to Musk’s assertions, Twitter is not - or should not be - a ‘town square’ where anyone can express any vile sentiment that comes into their head. Milo Yiannnopoulos and his gang had no ‘right’ to bully Leslie Jones, and democracy was not enhanced by such behaviour.
For some years now, the ‘new’ right, particularly in America, has become adept at pouring toxic messages into the political mainstream, using the banner of ‘free speech’ to promote the spurious idea that anything that can be said out loud represents some kind of social and democratic good, when it fact the limitless freedom they aspire to only benefits their movements, and is not intended to benefit anyone else.
On the one hand, conservative spokespeople like Coulter like to present themselves as victims of ‘cancel culture’ or ‘wokery’ (etc), when they are occasionally removed from social networking platforms like Twitter. At the same time these freeze peach warriors engage in cynical gaslighting by which ‘liberals’ and ‘the left’ are the ‘real’ fascists, because someone like Katie Hopkins is deprived of the platforms through which she has consistently brought the whole concept of free speech into disrepute.
Some of these complaints stem from the whining victimhood that the right always lays claim to, in which the ‘liberal media’ is always banning and ‘silencing’ conservatives. But some of it is intended to perpetuate Steve Bannon’s media strategy of ‘flooding the zone with shit’, by which alt-right and white nationalist movements across the world have deliberately propagated misinformation and disinformation through social media platforms.
Far from advancing the cause of democracy, the consequences of this wilful misuse of the digital ‘town square’ have been devastating. As The Aspen Institute noted in a report on ‘information disorder’ last year:
We see how our information ecosystem is failing the public, and how the absence or loss of trust in government entities, community institutions, and journalism, combined with a growing number of bad actors and conflict entrepreneurs who exploit these weaknesses, have led to real harms, sometimes with fatal consequences. Public discourse is deeply polarized and acrimonious; we are distrustful of each other and of powerful institutions (sometimes for good reason).
The report also noted that
Mis- and disinformation do not exist in a vacuum. The spread of false and misleading narratives, the incitement of division and hate, and the erosion of trust have a long history, with corporate, state actor, and political persuasion techniques employed to maintain power and profit, create harm, and/or advance political or ideological goals. Malicious actors use cheap and accessible methods to deliberately spread and amplify harmful information.
Many of these ‘malicious actors’ have used Twitter to achieve these objectives, and the reason they are celebrating Elon Musk’s takeover is because they think that he will help them to do that.
That may or may not be Space Rocket Guy’s intention, but already Tommy Robinson and Britain First have been trying to reinstate their accounts, while suspended accounts like Marjorie Taylor Greene have increased their followers. Donald Trump has so far said that he doesn’t intend to return to his Twitter bully pulpit, but no one should discount that possibility.
So while we wait to see how all this plays out, we should not allow ourselves to be scammed by these scammers anymore than we have already been. We should not fall for the ‘free speech’ gaslighting that allows malicious actors operating in plain sight to present themselves as democrats or contributors to the common good.
There is no doubt that the regulation of social media is a complex and difficult business, which raises all kinds of ethical and political issues about who should be doing the regulating and the ability to express certain views that we may not like or approve of.
But regulation needs to happen, and it isn’t ‘fascism’ when it does. Free speech is not a transcendental right that trumps all other social concerns. It should come with a certain responsibility, and we should allow free speech to be used as a wedge to break apart a democratic consensus that is always fragile. Alex Jones does not advance democracy by accusing the parents of the Sandy Hook massacre as ‘crisis actors.’
People have the right to think this kind of garbage, just as some people have the right to think all cyclists should be killed. But if they say such things in public they deserve at the very least to be removed from the ‘town square’, and we cannot rely on the benevolence of billionaires tweeting on toilets to do that for us.