Elon Musk Offers to Buy a Broken Website: Twitter Is Beyond Repair

[Celerity]

The platform has problems that Elon Musk can't fix

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/the-third-rail/62586fc76c9086002056f4cb/elon-musk-buy-twitter-bid/



Earlier today, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk made an offer to buy Twitter, and not only was it immediate front-page news across the land, but it created an immediate, anguished outcry on the website itself. I had a different reaction. Musk is trying to buy a broken website that’s helping break our culture, and that website might be beyond repair.

To understand the news event, we have to understand a few facts about Twitter, its users, and its effect on our culture. Taken together, these facts paint a picture of a website that is relatively small (compared to the rest of social media), disproportionately influential with the political elite, and distorts both the right and the left in deeply destructive ways.

If you look at a chart of popular social-media sites, you’ll note that you have to look far down the list to find Twitter. It’s way behind Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. It’s below a host of foreign social-media sites. It’s below even Telegram and Pinterest. It sits just above Reddit as the 15th-most-popular social-media site in the world.

But that’s not all. Only a small slice of Twitter’s users are active. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, only 10 percent of tweeters create 92 percent of all U.S. tweets. Combine all the numbers, and 3 percent of the American population creates 90 percent of all tweets. In other words, only a small minority of one of the smallest of the “significant” social-media sites produces any real content.

snip

[Lars39]

1. Not reading yet...still eying that pic of Musk.

wth kind of complex do you have to pose like that?!

[Celerity]

2. maybe

[Lars39]

3. I was thinking maybe something in the "divine" category.

[BootinUp]

12. Oh yeah, that second one is pretty close!

[Lars39]

9. Yep, he carefully posed

[Sympthsical]

4. Twitter is not real life.

"Combine all the numbers, and 3 percent of the American population creates 90 percent of all tweets."

I have been telling people this and telling people this. "Well, I know people agree with me, because on Twitter . . ."

Then when, say, a Youngkin gets elected, it's all, "How did this happen?!"

Twitter - particularly political Twitter - is a gigantic bubble where political junkies and media figures participate in a giant circle jerk that the overwhelming majority of America takes no part in and does not give a shit about.

The fact the media respond so sensitively to Twitter shows you this is less about journalism and more about what's going on in their very small, self-interested, self-promoting little world. WTF are journalists doing tweeting at each other and getting into internet slap fights all the time? These aren't serious journalistic figures. These are mildly educated celebrities who mistake visibility for importance.

I loathe Musk as a person, but I am loving the jimmy rustling happening this week. And all this panic and terror among media and political types proves my point - tech monopolies and social media companies should not have this much power over the public square.

It's fun when the people we hate get deplatformed and censored. But the pendulum always comes back.

[Celerity]

5. But there's one problem that's unique to Twitter--it's the social-media platform of choice for

virtually every journalist and political influencer in America. Almost all of my journalist peers are on Twitter (I can think of only one or two exceptions), and when I say “on” Twitter, I mean “on it hours per day.” If politicians aren’t on Twitter, their young staffers certainly are. And so is the creative class across the length and breadth of publishing, Big Tech, and entertainment. That means that Twitter punches well above its traffic in raw cultural impact. And that cultural influence is harmful to both sides of America’s partisan divide.

Spend much time reading the right on Twitter, and the first thing you’ll notice is a sense of almost-constant crisis. Everything is lost. Everything is slipping away. The left is ascendant, and therefore desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s exactly the kind of feeling one might expect if you spent your life in, say, Barbara Lee’s congressional district in Berkeley. Conservatism simply doesn’t have much purchase there.

But the dominance of the left has its own pitfalls for Democrats. According to Pew, Democratic Twitter users are to the left of the average Democrat: “Some 60% of Democrats on Twitter describe their political leanings as liberal (with 24% saying they are ‘very’ liberal), compared with 43% among those who are not Twitter users (only 12% of whom say they are very liberal).” As a result, it’s easy for the cultural elite to think not only that the United States is more left than it is, but also that the Democratic Party is more left than it is. In 2019 Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy published arguably the single-most-insightful analysis of the Democratic electorate of the entire election cycle:

The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.

There, in one paragraph, is a key reason why Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination and a key reason why so many online analysts wrote him off far too soon. He was out of step with Twitter, but he was in step with the majority of Democrats.

[chia]

6. "it's the social-media platform of choice for virtually every journalist" - and that's exactly why

I'm on it. I'm not on any of the other major social media sites, but Twitter is invaluable for following trusted journalists and investigative teams. It's been invaluable for up-to-the-minute news about Ukraine, from voices I trust.

[Sympthsical]

7. Which is why I find the calls for increased censorship so troubling

That first paragraph really nails the problem.

It's already a massive bubble. When voices are narrowed even further, it grows increasingly out of step.

Our national media have long been something of a NY-DC circle jerk where they all just talk to each other, report on each other, stroke each other for access and exposure. Whenever they do stories on other parts of America, it always takes on this kind of Gorillas in the Mist filter. It feels like David Attenborough should be narrating anything that takes place outside of a major city. "And here we see the hourly worker clock in to the Serengeti . . ."

I think, worst of all, bubbles make people more partisan. They're just talking to and reinforcing each other all day. "We believe this, right? We can't possibly be wrong. Ok, it's everyone else who is stupid and wrong." People no longer have conversations. They have slap fights, mob up to get people they don't like fired, and seek heretics whose pixels they can burn at the digital stake.

This is seriously socially toxic behavior. That our media and academic classes are some of the most vigorous participants should disturb everyone. We are becoming even dumber as people. Whenever the Right starts going on about "the elite" I always think, "What elite? Have you seen what these people say all day? It's 50% illogical gibberish, 50% pandering for likes and retweets."

I read Twitter mainly for pop culture content I enjoy. Going there to read about politics is pure poison. Social media are half the reason people are watching the Ukraine war like it's a new Netflix series where they agitate for the writers to start World War 3 for an enjoyable season finale.

There is little basis in reality to any of it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. I don't understand how your post title relates to the rest of it

The rest of your post is saying "people are using Twitter for bad things - only talking to like-minded people, or ganging up on people unlike them". The only way to stop that would be ... censorship. You'd have to limit what they see, or what they're allowed to say.

I don't see that "our media and academic classes are some of the most vigorous participants" in slap fights, mobs and heretic seeking. What the article says is they are some of the most vigorous participants on Twitter. That doesn't mean they're doing the toxic parts.

[TheProle]

10. What I want to know is:

If Twitter goes away tomorrow, where will I get my breathless ‘Tweets of the night’?

I need my hot takes. I am lost without pedestrian observations spiced up with profanity,
posturing as profundity.

[BootinUp]

11. This is exactly how it feels to me. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. So, what's the problem? It's subscriber only, so I can't read on

That most of the posts come from a few people is inevitable - because some people love it, and most just see it as one way of communicating.

I wonder if French is under the impression that Twitter should look representative of the world - that you ought to be able to count up the tweets on a topic and find out what people as a whole think (though, since you don't even know people's nationalities, this would be a pretty blunt tool anyway). No, you can't, and it would indeed need a completely different platform for that.

Your other excerpt says there are lots of journalists on it. That's the best thing about it - we can give them feedback, point out mistakes or add information for them, or recommend their work by retweeting. If it's a bad journalist that wont correct a mistake, then their error is visible to the public, not sitting in their email inbox, doing nothing. And we get to do the same with public figures. I take it as a point of pride that the awful Adrian Vermeule blocked me on Twitter, after I pointed out his hatred of atheists (he wants to ban them from juries) wasn't appropriate for a law professor.

Twitter has had a bot problem, but if people stop trying to take "weight of posts" as evidence of something, then it's not so bad - you ignore bots you've never heard of, and that won't engage with you.