Elon Musk
never cared if Twitter was a business failure – he wants a political win
This
article is more than 2 years old Richard Seymour
Richard
Seymour
The social
platform’s new billionaire owner wants to rebalance information ecologies in
favour of the right
Tue 22 Nov
2022 14.09 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/22/elon-musk-twitter-business-politics-right
Why bother
reinstating Donald Trump’s Twitter account? Twitter owner Elon Musk, having
said that no such decisions would be made until a content moderation council
was established, made the decision after running a quick Twitter poll. He also
reactivated the accounts of Kanye West, who was dumped by advertisers after
delusional antisemitic comments, and Andrew Tate, the misogynist “influencer”
who was banned in 2017 for violating the terms of service.
This puts
already nervous advertisers, who account for about 90% of the company’s
revenue, in a precarious position. The NAACP has called for big firms to halt
advertising on Twitter. Many of them have already done so. The Trump decision
also risks a wider political backlash for the platform, especially among users.
Musk is already under federal investigation for his conduct during the
takeover.
Despite Musk
being the world’s richest man, very little of what he has done since purchasing
Twitter looks remotely like good business sense. Some of this is down to his
management style playing out in a more public forum: he notoriously rules by
fear, breaking the law, busting unions and firing employees who criticise him.
He appears to want to establish the same pattern at Twitter, based on his
apparently unassailable conviction that he knows best. But his interest in
Twitter is not just commercial. He is clear that he thinks Twitter’s old
management had a left bias, and that he would like to restore a friendly
climate for rightist agitators. The goal appears to be to redesign Twitter, and
to change its perceived politics.
So, Musk
bought a platform of whose workings he knew little and began to “move fast and
break things”, as the Silicon Valley motto has it. The purchase itself, adding
$13bn to the company’s debt, was the first financial wound inflicted on the
company. The second was the axe taken to staffing, making advertisers nervous
and drawing the ire of the Federal Trade Commission. He has sacked enormous
numbers of staff, beginning with a purge of about half of employees, before
begging some of them to return. Meanwhile, a senior Twitter executive made it
clear how little those who did return were valued, and how soon they would get
the boot again. In leaked Slack messages, he called them “weak, lazy and
unmotivated”, and he said they could easily be sacked again.
Musk has
driven out a further estimated 1,200 staff members, including engineers
responsible for managing content and ironing out bugs, after imposing a de
facto loyalty oath. He has demanded engineers bring him examples of their own
coding work to determine their value to the company – odd, given that the code
is written collectively – and he has drafted 50 Tesla employees with no obvious
experience with social media software or design to look at Twitter’s code.
Recently, having got into a Twitter dispute with an engineer who knew more
about the platform’s performance issues than he did, he fired him by tweet.
His online
behaviour makes the company look terrible. Twitter’s factchecking service
humiliatingly corrected him after he falsely tweeted that Twitter “drives a
massive number of clicks” to other websites, being the “biggest click driver on
the internet by far”.
However,
nothing about Musk’s conduct suggests that the Twitter chaos is primarily about
business. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Musk’s takeover
was encouraged not just by the deposed executive Jack Dorsey but also by a
network of rightwing libertarian billionaires close to Musk, including PayPal
founder Peter Thiel. They argued that Twitter would be better run as a
privately owned business.
One reason
for the libertarians’ interest in Musk, says the WSJ, may have been his
political evolution. Although he was once a centrist who backed Andrew Yang, he
vehemently rejected the banning of Trump, believed that Twitter’s content
moderation policies were being driven by politics, and claimed that Twitter was
“far-left-biased”. (This is quite untrue: Twitter’s own internal research found
that it amplified rightwing content.) He has become a purveyor of
disinformation, for example on Covid-19, and the attack on Paul Pelosi (husband
of House speaker Nancy Pelosi). As Twitter CEO, he used the platform to
encourage voters to support the Republicans in the US midterm elections and,
when they lost, spread a conspiracy theory that Sam Bankman-Fried laundered
money for the Democrats. He is, though hardly a Trumper, cheerfully adjacent to
the culture war politics of the American far right.
This would
suggest that the billionaire takeover was, in part, a political move aimed at
“disrupting” communications networks that the American right has repeatedly
claimed are biased against it. Twitter, as a political entity, punches well
above its business weight. In its early days, it thrived on its association
with the Obama White House, and its presumed role in “Twitter revolutions” (a
phrase minted by the state department). It was seen as a means of projecting US
influence abroad. It didn’t cause those revolutions any more than it did the
Trump presidency, or Black Lives Matter, but it was central to those political
battles because of the way activists, politicians and reporters used the
platform. Despite having many fewer users than Facebook or TikTok, it was and
remains a powerful tool for shaping public discourse. Whoever controls it,
whether or not they know what they’re doing, wields real political power.
Despite what
Musk thinks, Twitter’s old board didn’t wield this power for the left, or even
for liberals. Their content moderation policies evolved over time to placate
advertisers and governments. They did not want to get rid of the various
fascist microcelebrities and far-right disinfotainers, let alone the lucrative
big beasts of the far right such as Trump and Alex Jones: they were forced to.
Now, under Musk’s one-man rule, Twitter is being realigned. This is partly for
Musk’s own recreation. He likes to “trigger the libs” and laps up the purveyors
of incitement, disinformation and far-right propaganda on his platform. But
it’s also to rebalance online information ecologies further in favour of the
right.
The
reinstatement of Trump’s account will not bring back the days when the former
president was worth $2bn to Twitter in a single year. But it is indicative of
where Musk wants to take the platform.
Richard
Seymour is a political activist and author; his latest book is The Twittering
Machine
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