How Might Jesus Lead Twitter? He Already Is.
3 Wicked Problems and What Jesus Might Do About Them
It’s December 2021, and The Babylon Bee has landed an interview with their biggest guest ever: Elon Musk. After 90 minutes discussing politics, taxes, the Metaverse, comedy, and which superhero Elon would be, the Bee’s editors ask Musk for a favor…
Bee: “We’re wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept Jesus as your lord and savior on the show.”
The hosts laugh awkwardly. Their attempt to skewer 1970s-style American evangelism displays the flawed satire the site is known for. They glance around off-camera wondering where the joke landed, wishing it had. But this is Elon Musk, a secular humanist who grew up outside the U.S.
Musk too seems uncomfortable. His body language, which had been relatively open throughout the interview, has collapsed into a pair of crossed arms. But his discomfort seems different: Having attended an Anglican prep school as a boy, Musk knows something of religion. He shifts in his chair, and rubs his chin. Even if Christianity now occupies a dusty corner of Musk’s childhood, there still remains in him something of a childlike reverence. Why risk trodding on something sacred? Musk seems to be thinking. Then, the man who smoked marijuana with Joe Rogan chooses a more sober approach, and begins talking about Jesus.
Musk: “I mean let’s just say, like, I agree with the principles that Jesus advocated and that there’s great wisdom in the teachings of Jesus and I agree with those teachings. And things like, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ are very important because… as opposed to an eye for an eye. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, so forgiveness is important, and treating people as you would wish to be treated. ’Love thy neighbor as thyself’ — very important.”
Musk is certainly not eloquent — he quotes Jesus and then parrots an anonymous meme as his midrash — but his answer is earnest. He falls back on the golden rule, something any religious schoolboy would have had drilled into him.
Still, Musk seems to maintain a degree of reverence for Jesus. It may not be the kind of submission to Christ’s lordship that some Christians see as essential, but Musk’s own reaction betrays a kind of sacred sentiment — an emotion that precedes belief like CS Lewis speaks of in “Men Without Chests.” Musk seems to feel a humility at the thought of Jesus, something his interviewers have somehow been inoculated to, perhaps thanks to their own encounters with 1970s American evangelicalism.
Since that interview in December 2021, Musk has had quite a time. He made an audacious bid to buy Twitter in April, then retracted his offer in May, only to be compelled by a no-nonsense chancery court to make good on his $44-billion-dollar purchase by October. Days after taking the helm, Musk fired most of Twitter’s executives and half of its 7,500 staff. Then he emailed the other half, inviting them to work “extremely hardcore” or leave. An attractive prospect. Hundreds more left. Oh, and he also fired thousands of external contractors too.
Meanwhile, Musk rolled out Twitter Blue to verify the identities of users, only to pause it 2 days later, when impersonators started buying their very own blue checkmarks for accounts purporting to be anyone from athlete Lebron James to pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. By the end of November, Twitter had stopped fighting COVID misinformation on the platform, and changed its content moderation policies. He reinstated the banned accounts of, among others, former president Donald Trump and The Babylon Bee itself, which was deplatformed in April 2022 for deadnaming a transgender person and refusing to retract it.
Musk promised to be a free-speech leader for Twitter, but by mid-December, Musk himself had the @ElonJet account removed from the platform for doxxing, even after committing not to. Then news reporters who covered the story also found themselves banned, then reinstated. Suffice it to say, Musk’s handling of Twitter in 2022 was rocky at best.
And then, on December 19th, almost a year to the day after his interview aired with the Babylon Bee, Elon polled the Twitterverse: “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.” The poll ran for 24 hours. 17.5 million Twitter users voted, and 57.5% of them said “Yes.” With that, Musk promised to resign once he found a replacement.
Problem #1: The Balance Sheet
Regardless of whom Musk appoints to right the Twitter ship, few will be able to resolve the many challenges facing the social platform. After spending $44 billion to buy Twitter, they will have to make it profitable for their new boss. Musk secured $13 billion in bank loans and covered the rest through equity financing. That means banks want their loans repaid with interest, and investors want their stake to accrue more value. Those demands mean increasing Twitter’s ability to make money.
To be profitable, the head of Twitter has a balance to strike: satisfy both users and advertisers. This balance is new for Musk. Social platforms aren’t like his other businesses — and he has many — which mostly deliver a hardware product to paying customers. By contrast, platforms like Twitter must deliver a perceived value to users so that they stick around. That way, the company can sell users’ attention to advertisers, which tends to degrade the user experience. Too much advertising means fewer users. No users, no advertising. No advertising, no revenue. Striking this balance isn’t so simple. Can Musk do it? Can anyone?
How Might Jesus Manage Twitter’s Revenue?
Since Musk does seem to have some regard for Jesus, and Jesus is the center of the “faith” in FaithTech, how would Jesus advise Musk? Since Musk admires and agrees with Jesus’ principles, what wisdom would Jesus offer Musk? If Musk is looking for a better leader, he can find no one better than someone who spawned a movement with billions of followers. That’s a level of influence Musk can only dream of. So how would Jesus do it? How might Jesus lead Twitter?
For Jesus, perhaps the biggest challenge with Twitter would be its obligation to increase shareholder value. These obligations betray the real leader of Twitter: Money. In the gospels, the Rich Young Man could have easily been someone like Elon Musk. And to that man, Jesus said, “Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor…. Then come, follow me.” And the rich man went away sad “for he had many possessions.” Yet, the obligations of money-making face not only Twitter, but many, if not most, companies. We cannot point the finger at Musk or Twitter without acknowledging that it’s also hard for many of us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
In his most recent book, The Life We’re Looking For, Andy Crouch shows how technology is profoundly (though not fatally) tied to the service of Mammon. “What technology wants is really what Mammon wants,” Crouch writes (p78), echoing the ancient word “Mammon” that Jesus used. Mammon, Crouch argues, can “master a person every bit as completely as the true God” (p75).
Were Jesus to lead Twitter, he would shake Twitter free from its slavery to Mammon. He would reorient the company toward other, more redemptive purposes. In doing so, Jesus would free Twitter from the need to drive engagement, from having to nudge users to stay longer and longer. Freed from the shackles of the engagement–revenue cycle, Twitter would be freed to serve users in more meaningful and enriching ways.
This vision may appear idealistic, but Twitter 2.0 is closer to it than one might realize. For Musk, revenue is not his only goal. He also wants free speech. The gap between these two values represents an opening through which Jesus might enter. While Jesus would not make “free speech” his ultimate goal, the gap demonstrates that other values can be — and are — held over against Mammon. Mammon is not Musk’s absolute master. Free speech is a chink in the shackles of money. In that fissure, other values and visions could gain leverage. Twitter could contribute to something other than making more money. That way lies not just free speech but freedom.
Still, we must be wary. Money retains the upper hand over free speech. Why? Because “what gets measured is what gets done,” and it’s easier to quantify and measure money than to measure free speech. How would we measure “free speech,” or any virtue? We can’t count it like we can money. The countable nature of money will sustain it as the de facto objective, and uphold it as the final arbiter.
So is there any hope? One of the possibilities of digital data is the opportunity to create new metrics that companies could aim for. Could digital analytics help us to better measure free speech and other values? If so, might such metrics help to break the chokehold money has?
For Twitter, the first thing Jesus might do at the helm is to reorient the ship to a new star. Maximizing revenue would no longer be its guiding principle, or its god. In that way, Twitter would be freed to dignify people rather than drain their attention and extract ad revenue.
Problem #2: Content Moderation
Generating revenue isn’t Twitter’s only challenge. The platform must also placate numerous other interest groups. Not just users and advertisers, but also non-profits, advocacy groups, celebrities, and influencers — to say nothing of politicians. They want a platform where they can connect with their audience, and where their audiences feel safe and satisfied (and often vindicated). Niche populations are looking for safe spaces, protected from offensive posts. That requires moderating content. But satisfaction also means empowering individuals and groups to express their views without feeling gagged. That requires free speech. Can Musk balance these competing requirements?
Content moderation is probably the single biggest challenge Twitter faces. It is the primary way that the platform will keep people coming back, and in turn, generating revenue. Without some form of content moderation, Twitter likely can’t be profitable.
Content moderation doesn’t have to mean all-or-nothing censorship though. Other options exist too. Twitter could implement escalating limits that increasingly restrict users before being deplatformed: It might start with a pop-up nudging them to reconsider what they’re about to publish, or limit the age range of their audience or how frequently they can post, or impose temporary suspensions, all before permanently banning them.
Establishing restrictions like this is actually the easier part of content moderation. More tricky is actually identifying abusive content and determining what restrictions should be imposed.
Abusive posts include content that is considered hate speech, pornographic, or misinformation. All of which are protected to some extent under US free speech laws. But as one critic wrote in his open letter to Elon, “you can make all the promises about ‘free speech’ you want,” — which certainly seems to be Musk’s MO, though only to a point — “but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money.” So again, Elon’s big conundrum with Twitter comes down to making money, repaying his loans, and satisfying investors.
Moderate Proposals
Musk’s unconventional, unpredictable leadership style has met with both hand-wringing and warning shots.The European Commission urged Musk to be less “arbitrary” in his methods or risk being banned across Europe. A continent Musk certainly can’t afford to lose. Musk responded that their request was “very sensible.”
Days earlier, Musk had accused Apple of threatening to remove Twitter from its app store, believing it had to do with Twitter 2.0’s moderation policies. To this perceived threat, Musk was less diplomatic, calling out Apple’s CEO Tim Cook on Twitter, asking whether Apple is anti-free speech. (In response, Cook, rather than taking to Twitter himself, wisely took Musk for a walk, where they seemingly resolved Musk’s grievances.)
It’s not only governments and tech companies either. Lots of others have opinions about how Musk should moderate Twitter. Many include thoughtful analysis and solutions, and Twitter 2.0 would probably benefit to listen to them.
In early 2021, Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman outlined 6 ways that social media companies could reconfigure their platforms to reduce the need for moderation. They acknowledged consensus isn’t possible on platforms with a global footprint. Cultural norms around the planet are too diverse for a one-size-fits-all approach. Like Askonas and Schulman, former Meta employee Ravi Iyer also argued that global moderation policies won’t work. What’s more he advocates for not simply reducing harm, but promoting health. Still another commentator, Jim Harper, suggests that Twitter focus on moderating community behaviors instead of content.
For Twitter 2.0, one encouraging sign is that some of these recommendations seem to appear in the company’s policies: Users may have “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” Rather than banning users, Twitter said that they manage offensive content by de-amplifying it, a strategy variously dubbed “visibility filtering” or “shadow-banning.” Abusive content might be allowed to be posted, but it may not spread very far. This approach echoes Askonas and Schulman’s qualified agreement that “you have a right to speech but not to an audience.” Would it be better not to allow harmful speech at all? There’s plenty of disagreement about that.
In summary, Elon Musk must drive revenue and balance competing interests, all while making Twitter a place where some users can freely speak their minds without feeling muzzled, and other users can scroll through their feeds without feeling offended. All this sounds easy enough, right?
Problem #3: Scale
As we’ve already seen, a few commentators agree that one size doesn’t fit all for content moderation. They suggest downscaling Twitter to more community-level interactions and more community-based moderation. They believe it will incentivize better dialog and contextualize content decisions. All of this highlights the simple problem of scale.
One size does not fit all. People in smaller groups tend to be more respectful and more understanding of one another. Smaller scales tend to improve moderation, whereas large systems dehumanize. Plus, as scale decreases, policy and moderator transparency can increase.
Of course, downscaling means increasing the number of human moderators, which costs money and depletes revenue. It could also inhibit brands from broadcast-style advertising because it lacks the nuance that might be needed to pass moderation muster, again negatively affecting revenue. But let’s imagine that Jesus frees Twitter from the revenue trap. How, then, might he configure the scale of Twitter?
How Might Jesus Manage Twitter’s Global Scale?
Scale is an interesting question for Christians. Megachurches have pressed against this issue most clearly — often ignoring it, sometimes offering a variety of biblical cases that bigger is better. Before them, broadcast ministries on both radio and television justified ever-increasing scale on the grounds of evangelistic reach and fulfilling the Great Commission. In general, most disputes have been overshadowed by the perpetual claim that “it works.”
The problems of pragmatism aside, does Jesus engage with people at scale? The largest scale we see Jesus encountering are the crowds of thousands who came to hear him teach, and whom he then miraculously fed. Some experts estimate these crowds were as large as ten to fifteen thousand people. For these massive crowds, Jesus used parables, telling them stories to illustrate — but also shroud — his teachings. To help his words stick in their hearts and minds, he also used turns of phrase, pithy proverbs, and humor. Of course, he also gave them food, which left its own distinct impressions.
Besides preaching to thousands, Jesus seems to have more often interacted in much smaller groups. He spoke to 72 disciples, entrusting to them his teachings and healing power. After his resurrection, he appeared to 500. But most often, he spent time with his twelve disciples, and to them he opened up his teachings and spoke more plainly and with fewer parables.
Finally, with his three closest friends, Peter, James, and John, Jesus revealed himself in mysterious and confounding ways through his transfiguration. What they witnessed, they spent the rest of their lives trying to articulate, understand, and respond to. It was perhaps the deepest expression of himself Jesus gave anyone.
The deepest that is, until he surrendered himself to be crucified.
All these examples of scale, aside from the cross, reflect how Jesus interacted with groups who were amenable to him. But what about his haters? What about those who trolled him? How did he respond to them? Did he choose to cancel them or doxx them?
Jesus engaged his opponents mostly in public settings. The religious leaders of his day, they being the privileged and powerful, he encountered in front of many witnesses, and everyone heard his responses to them. They also saw his reactions. We can imagine this included both his own disciples and many who aligned with the opposition. It likely also included many onlookers who were deciding whose side to take.
But Jesus also engaged personally with his opponents. The Pharisee Nicodemus came to Jesus late at night to talk openly with him. To Nicodemus, Jesus spoke relatively plainly. He did not try to hide his ideas. He used metaphors like “being born again,” not to obscure, but because they were the best words to bridge the knowledge gap between them. With Pilate, Jesus was direct, though somewhat cryptic. With Herod, he chose not to speak at all.
The scale of Jesus’ engagement ranged from one-on-one to tens of thousands. He engaged both publicly and privately with both supporters and opponents.¹
In every case, Jesus contextualized his words and actions to fit the situation. For the crowds, he told memorable stories that would draw them together to discuss among themselves what he meant. For the mobs, he challenged “the one who has never sinned throw the first stone” and then kneeled down and drew in the dirt. For the most powerful, he chose silence. And for the world, he chose a cross.
What can Jesus’ engagement at scale teach us? As the scale increases, Jesus’ communication shifts from words to actions. What’s more, his large-scale actions exist to serve others, not himself. He feeds thousands by thanking and praising God. He feeds billions by giving his body as an offering to God. But as the scale shrinks back down, Jesus’ communication shifts to words (mostly), and with greater intimacy comes more vulnerability. Yet, at his most vulnerable, in the Transfiguration, (and perhaps in being betrayed by Judas) Jesus’ actions again take center stage. So that Jesus, in his actions, communicates at both the most intimate and the most universal levels. Actions do indeed seem to speak louder, and quieter, than words.
We would do well to embrace Jesus’ own approach to scale, letting our actions speak clearly to our largest audiences and to our most intimate friendships — always in service to them, not to ourselves. Between those extremes of scale, we adapt our words to fit the mediums to which they are best suited. Not every large-scale audience deserves our intimate vulnerability, just as our closest friends don’t deserve to be treated like audience-members.
Musk of course cannot control all these things. Even if this approach could be operationalized into a set of policies, Twitter 2.0 could neither nudge nor incentivize people enough to align to them perfectly. But pursuing such a vision may still improve overall conditions on the platform.
How Might Jesus Moderate Content?
Creating policies for good communication at scale returns us again to the question of content moderation. How might Jesus — having reoriented Twitter to serve God rather than Mammon, and having adapted users’ words and actions to fit the various scales of communication — how might he manage abusive and offensive content at scale? How would Jesus moderate content?
Would he, on the one hand, disregard cultural context and individual intent and simply apply universal, one-size-fits-all rules to any situation? This approach sounds simple at first, especially for global platforms. But try identifying the context of each tweet and the intentions of each author so you can apply that policy. It can’t be done. Not at scale, and not with a confidence level that would satisfy any computer programmer.
Or would Jesus go to the other extreme and tailor each judgment to each individual, with no generalizable policy? Taking it case-by-case is certainly not easier. It takes immense resources to interpret a tweet, discern its meaning, articulate the author’s intent, and determine its publishable merit.
The reality is, content moderation is a wicked problem. But that’s no excuse. Twitter still has to make decisions about it. So we can’t let Jesus off the hook either. How would he advise they do it? Once again, it starts with reframing the problem.
One commentator put it this way, “people are intensely complicated [and] total assholes.” The apostle Paul put it a bit more eloquently, writing, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Yes, content moderation on Twitter is a systems problem, and should be dealt with as such. But content moderation in life is also a people problem and must also be dealt with as such.
For Jesus, the problem of moderation is not at the assessment phase where the content gets evaluated. Unfortunately, for Musk and Twitter 2.0, that’s the only phase they have to work with. Content moderation has to be a systems problem, and an algorithm problem, because Twitter is a system and an algorithm. But for Jesus, the problem is upstream from Twitter — it’s effectively outside of Twitter.
While Jesus at Twitter might implement some of the policies and systems solutions that commentators have suggested, he would most certainly deal with the upstream problems that people create simply by being sinful, selfish, and proud. In fact, he already is.
A Departing Leader
When Jesus finally announces to his disciples that he will be leaving them, it sounds to them like the worst news ever. When Jesus arrived, he transformed their lives. Every day they were with him, they experienced a longing and its satisfaction. Now, the prospect of his departure sounds like hell to them. Jesus notices this. “You grieve because of what I’ve told you.” And his absence would be hell for them, except that Jesus has already arranged to take care of them. He reassures them, “I will not abandon you as orphans.” Then he explains, “It is best for you that I go away, because if I don’t, the Advocate won’t come. If I do go away, then I will send him to you. … When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.”
Rather than giving humanity a system of policies, Jesus gives us a Spirit. It is this Spirit that works upstream from Twitter, “giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.”
The work of the Spirit is both personal and universal. He works at the most personal level with our inner spirit, and he also coordinates his work with the universal realities of what God is doing in and for the whole world. His Spirit does not act through coercion but through conscience and calling. His Spirit nudges our conscience, but lets us decide for ourselves. His created order incentivizes a life lived by the Spirit, but we can at our own peril choose to abide by society’s rules. We can gain the whole world and lose our soul.
The problems of content moderation the Spirit resolves by working in the hearts and minds of users themselves, to speak and act in ways that serve and care for others, rather than skewering others with a tweet, or canceling them for their offensive opinion.
The problems of power the Spirit resolves by nudging our conscience, rather than coercing us without our consent. The Spirit consistently applies an ethic of love in every interaction — and encourages each of us to do the same — rather than asserting an arbitrary power to whatever case might reach his attention.
The Spirit is superior to every system. It’s not only the method Jesus would use with Twitter — it is the “method” Jesus uses with his people, the Church. Together, the Church seeks to listen to God’s Spirit and to respond with their own loving words and actions. The church, then, is what Jesus would do for Twitter. Musk has his Twitter employees, but Jesus has his church. And what Jesus would do in Twitter is what he is already doing in his church.
This fact is both encouraging and sobering. Encouraging for Twitter because often the church doesn’t look much better than Twitter. That means there’s hope for Twitter: God is familiar with fixing wicked problems. The fact is also sobering for Christians because too often the church doesn’t look much better than Twitter. That should give Christians pause for where the church is and how far away we are from the spotless bride the Spirit is still calling us to become.
The good news is, the Church has been here before, so we can learn from our mistakes. The bad news is, the Church has been here before, and we still need to learn from our mistakes.
A Church in Step with the Spirit
In the letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul is contending for a church driven by the Spirit and not by a system. Jesus had made the Jewish Law obsolete. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses?” he asks. “Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ.”
For Christians, the power of words is evident in the message of Jesus: They heard it, believed it, and received the Holy Spirit because of it. That fact demonstrates just how powerful a message can be — even a message like those we scroll through everyday on Twitter.
But Twitter is managed by a system, not by a Spirit. And it’s headed by the man who, if his wealth is any indication of his allegiances, has devoted his life to Mammon. Jesus’ call to the Church is to live by the Spirit and keep in step with the Spirit. That way the church will demonstrate the abundant life that arises from responding to the Spirit’s voice in our lives.
But like the Galatians, the church is tempted to return to systems instead. “Oh, foolish Galatians! Who has cast a spell on you?” Paul implores them to shake off that alchemy. “After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort?”
The work of the church is not to put its faith in a system, in a man, or in Mammon, but to put its faith in the Spirit of God, to listen and respond, and to walk where he leads. If we do, our hopes won’t rise and fall with the latest tweet of a wealthy man, but we will live by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Adam Graber co-hosts the Device & Virtue podcast. He consults on Digital Theology for FaithTech, Leadership Network, GACX, and is a coach at Wheaton College’s Center for Faith and Innovation. Connect with him on, where else?, Twitter @AdamGraber.
Footnote
¹ Besides Jesus, we could look elsewhere in the Bible and find other economies of scale, from Moses’ judicial system to the Levitical priesthood to the Apostle’s food program. All of these systems represent attempts to manage increased scales while preserving the human dignity of the people involved.
