Elon Musk just bought Twitter. For 44 billion dollars.
Egad, I could think of several thousand better ways to spend $44B. In fact, I brought the topic up ten or fifteen years ago, in an entry here called “If I Had a Billion.” Funny how I can’t find it now on Duck Duck Go, or I’d post a link. Maybe I just imagined it. Maybe I’ve been canceled. Maybe too many people want to talk about being billionaires and my post is down in the noise. No matter.
So what is the guy actually going to do with his new toy? It’s tempting to think of the acquisition as a shot across the bow of social networking, in essence saying, “You can be bought. You won’t like being bought. So lay off with the censorship already.”
Threats of that sort aren’t his style. My best guess is that he’s going to tweak a lot of noses by focusing on Twitter and allowing real discussions about formerly forbidden topics, like climate, race, COVID treatments, and such–you know, the things that have gotten a lot of people thrown off Twitter in recent years. I haven’t gotten thrown off because I’m careful about what I post. Being careful (and not spending half my life there) means I won’t get a lot of attention. (I will admit that mentioning my books on Twitter always sells a few. Otherwise I might have quit long ago.) I don’t talk about politics. And this is why I have 611 followers, rather than several thousand. Being famous is hard work. And if I’m going to be famous, I’d rather not do it on Twitter.
He could also order his techies to add an edit function to Twitter. Dare we hope?
I’ll hope. I won’t assume. Anyway. He could do a number of things to make the service worthwhile:
- Add edit functionality. Ok, that’s too easy.
- Expand the size of a tweet to 1,000 characters. Or 2,000? At their current length, tweets are most useful in online fistfights. Real discussion requires more space than that. Give users more space, and the quality of the dicussions almost can’t help but go up. I hope.
- Slow down replies and retweets. I’ve written about this here before. The idea is to exponentially increase the time it takes for a given tweet to “go viral.” One reply, instantly. Two, one second. Three, two seconds. Four, four seconds. Five, eight seconds. Etc. This would put a huge damper on Twitter lynch mobs. And one would hope that that the psychotic hotheads who comprise those mobs will get bored and go somewhere else. In their place will be slower, and (with some luck) more rational conversations. Read the entry I linked. I think it would work. I don’t think Mr. Musk will do it.
- Eliminate the “blue check” status game. Have one color check (which color doesn’t matter) indicating that the poster has proven that he or she is who they say they are and are not a bot. Require that “checks” use their real names. You’re either real or not real. Twitter has no damned business deciding who is important and who isn’t.
- Charge users by the tweet. Really. Retain free memberships, but limit the number of tweets that free memberships can post. Create brackets of paid memberships in which the highest paid memberships can post unlimited tweets, with less expensive memberships allowing fewer tweets. This would probably cut the number of Twitter users in half (if not more) but would bring in enough revenue to make the system pay for itself. And I can’t help but think that the people who would quit would be the people who make the most trouble. The quality of dicussion would almost certainly improve.
That’s what I have so far. One thing that I think would be very useful but I doubt anyone will ever do is create a federation API allowing different social media services to share messages among themselves. Maybe Twitter should become a back-end for systems that want to participate but also want to curate the content that their network allows. In other words, if people on the left want to toss out people on the right, and people on the right want to toss out those on the left, Twitter would take everybody and let individual users choose to follow whomever they please. Let the crazies have their bubbles. Make Twitter the Big, Here-Comes-Everybody bubble.
A system like that would take some thought and some serious work. It wouldn’t be impossible. (There’s something called Mastodon that has gone some distance in that direction, albeit at a much smaller scale.) And what it would create would be infinitely better than what we have now.
G’wan, Elon. Give it a shot. You own it. Now do what you do best, which is…surprising us.
good thoughtful suggestions but I think the chance that Twitter implodes are pretty high. Have you seen the graph of the political donations by party for Silicon Valley media companies? Twitter employees’ donations were 98.7% to Democrats.
So will a critical mass of staff quit? Twitter pays well, according to my sources. Much depends on his management style, and I’ve heard mixed reports on that. We won’t know until he starts to take over.
I do think that people who will leave a company simply because they disagree with the owner’s politics are precisely the sort of people that that the company would be better off without. Fossil that I am, I still think that politics does not belong in the workplace. He could do something crazy like move the whole thing to Texas, in which case all bets are off.
There is bravado, and then there is reality. Many will threaten to quit, but California is an enormously expensive place to be unemployed.
I would think also that there will be some impressive dismissals, if only to get the attention of those who think they can continue their hard left ways under the new ownership.
Must is more left than not, as far as I can tell, but he has claimed to be a free speech absolutist. Given that speech is either free or not, that’s a redundant qualifier, but I digress.
Possibly more interesting is that Hack Dorsey seems to be in complete agreement with Musk on free speech. Time will tell, of course, but I think that Twitter may become a screaming free for all, with hard division, and very little middle to be seen.
Should that happen, I wonder what Musk and Dorsey may consider to recover the environment. I surely can’t imagine it being a relevant space for discourse, if it’s all screaming and name-calling. That would be the shortest path to demise.
People seem to forget that a lot of the stuff the social networks do to restrict speech are done, not because the social network companies want to do it, but because governments have forced them to do it.
The laws haven’t changed just because Musk has purchased Twitter, so there’s only so much he can change. He’ll still have to keep a lot of the controls in place or they will be prosecuted.
I respectfully disagree. But I’ll hear you out. Please respond to these points:
1) In what ways has the US government forced restrictions on social networks?
2) What sorts of controls will Musk have to keep in place?
3) Please provide examples of governments prosecuting social networks.
Twitter has (absurdly) banned people for posting links to older research papers published by the CDC, for posting links to evidence that global warming isn’t the threat it’s claimed to be, links to research about COVID that do not follow The Narrative, and on and on. The term “misinformation” is never defined, and yet people are banned for posting, in essence, whatever Twitter’s management doesn’t like.
I dislike talk about politics here, but Twitter’s restrictions point in only one political direction. Musk could end that, and I suspect he will. He may continue restrictions against sexual content and illegal things like child porn, but nobody’s going to be on his case about that.
There are strong protections in the Constitution against government censorship of private individuals and organizations, especially censorship of political speech. I doubt that the US government will place any restrictions on a Musk-owned Twitter that do not already apply to all other social networks, and those are few and far between.
My hope is that Musk will, having bought the thing, simply shut it down. That would definitely improve the quality of discourse.
That would work too, heh. But my suggestions (which would make Twitter a lot more like Facebook) might provide us with a forum that would be less emotional and more thoughtful, and no longer biased in only one political direction. I’d use that.
I still don’t know whether or not I would like Twitter increasing the character limit. On one hand, it was meant for short life updates, “OMG gonna meet my online bf for the 1st time 2day, cant wait!” kind of stuff. However, most people don’t use it for that. No, they make *gigantic* threads which, while while nice and all, are much more suited for a blog.
So, I dunno. I like Twitter the way it is, but at the same time I really think there should be an option for longer tweets, and an option to filter between normal ones and ‘bloggy’ ones.