A call to the Twitterverse: Stay put
We’re both the product he sells to advertisers and the object of desire for those same advertisers. For that reason, Elon Musk needs us more than we need him
Elon Musk walked into Twitter headquarters the other day looking like a blissed-out plumber making a delivery, though he was, in fact, a new owner making a point. Musk acquired the social-media company on Oct. 27 for $44 billion in present and future money, formally ending the various efforts made to keep Twitter from becoming, in effect, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Elon Musk.
Since Oct. 27, the new self-described Chief Twit has taken a meat-ax to his own staff, firing C-suite dwellers, data engineers, and well, anyone else under his watch he didn’t like. He didn’t buy Twitter in a vacuum, of course. He understands that a social-media platform has no value without the social products — the people — voicing and animating that platform. A Hyde Park soapbox is pretty much worthless if no one steps up and speaks.
Which is where you come in. You and me and the collective Twitterverse. Since Oct. 27, people have been bailing, closing their Twitter accounts and heading for the exits. IMHO, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do right now.
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Why? It doesn’t make sense to walk away from money on the table. It really doesn’t make sense when you are the money on the table. We, the Twitterverse, are the currency in this deal that really matters: the 238 million mDAU (monetizable daily active users), the hundreds of millions who inhabit Twitter every day. Fifteen percent more now than at the same time last year (per Statista).
OK, Elon Musk bought the pipes. But we’re the current, the water, the lifeblood flowing through those pipes, and he didn’t buy us. As tempting as it is at this moment, to walk away from Twitter now is to abandon our leverage in the value proposition that made Twitter worth buying in the first place. Because in the broad context of aggregate contribution, in the hard cold math of who brings how much what to the transaction — Elon Musk doesn’t run Twitter. We do.
Why? Because we’re the voters politicians want to reach. We’re the consumers advertisers want to persuade. We’re the deciders that tastemakers want to share ideas and opinions with. We’re the viewers and readers journalists want to inform. We’re the eyeballs that give Twitter its intrinsic value as a magnet for global attention. That is our edge. That’s our inescapable leverage.
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The transactional aspects of this new relationship between Chief Twit and the Twitter community he presumes to shape and influence will certainly extend to the content moderation policies he says are still to be determined — including creation of a “content moderation council” composed of … well, we don’t know yet.
But that underscores the importance of staying on the platform long enough, and in numbers close to the platform’s pre-takeover mDAU count, to see what content-mod policies Musk actually proposes — and to gauge his outreach, or lack of outreach, to the broader community as to what those policies should be.
A seat or three for everyday people on the proposed content council would be useful. So would Twitter’s own polling technology, if Musk’s inclined to use it that way: The company could start a Twitter poll weighing the pros and cons of a proposed content moderation policy from the users’ perspective, sampling the opinions of Twitter users before the policy is implemented.
The need to set and enforce new content-mod policies was made clear in the hours after Musk took over on Oct. 27. Yoel Roth, Twitter head of safety and integrity, tweeted on Oct. 29 that “a small number of accounts” posted “slurs and other derogatory terms.” Roth tried to put it in numerical context, with a nasty tweets: normal tweets ratio intended to minimize the impact.
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But that ratio misses the point. That malignant flareup of mouthbreathers and cranks indicates the problems with Musk being a self-described “free speech absolutist,” someone apparently willing to open the floodgates to any and all content. Those problems were even more obvious after Musk tried to reassure advertisers that Twitter wouldn’t become “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Days after Twitter had become just that.
On Oct. 28, the Network Contagion Research Institute posted a tweet showing that the use of the N-word on Twitter spiked by almost 500 percent compared to the previous average. NCRI also found that recent posts on the conservative 4chan platform “encourage users to amplify derogatory slurs.”
Twitter is said to have shut down some of these users. But that same disconnect between Musk’s warning and reality was distilled in a single tweet from Musk himself, a tweet since deleted, in which he offered a groundless conspiracy theory for the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Will the real Elon Musk please stand up, please stand up? General Motors is waiting for that to happen, pausing its advertising on the platform until the Chief Twit stops talking out of both sides of the mouth he’s got his foot in. Other advertisers will likely follow suit.
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Among the other reasons for staying put, some practical, some more purely emotional? For what it’s worth, it’s my sense that Twitter’s about to get very interesting, maybe more interesting than it’s ever been before, and you don’t want to be watching this from the outside with your face pressed up against the glass.
The probable return of former President* Donald Trump to the platform has purportedly struck fear in the hearts of the Twitterverse; many of you have already jumped ship and decamped for Discord, Mastodon or other platforms (never mind having to sign up for waitlists for some of the most popular topic-based channels or servers). But fears of being trolled on Twitter by the former bloviator-in-chief shouldn’t be controlling.
If you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time, you’ve got skin in the game — followers, people you’re following, and any number of tweets and replies to tweets that, among other things, form a running diary of your social interaction with people you never knew, lives you didn’t know existed. Are you ready to throw out those links to important content, all that hard work, all that progress, just to start over somewhere else?
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If content moderation is your (reasonable) concern, Jon Schwarz at the Intercept gets what’s happening, or about to happen, at Twitter’s Savage Irony Dept.: “When the content moderation of Twitter remains largely the same, the sense of betrayal among Musk’s super-fans will explode with the force of a supernova. And they will scream at Musk about it nonstop — on Twitter. … he will feel constantly compelled to either explain why he’s standing by his underlings’ moderation decisions, or reverse them. Then he will inevitably be drawn into personally making more and more content calls, perhaps giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to individual tweets.
“It will be hell on earth for him. No matter what decisions he makes, he will infuriate large swaths of Twitter.”
And that’s the law of the nature of the social-media beast: No one rides without being bitten by the beast itself. Whether you bought the beast or not doesn’t matter. So, it helps to have a thick hide yourself. You folks in the Twitterverse have one. Musk? Not so much.
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In a pitch to advertisers, Musk accidentally reveals the emptiness of his own intentions. He expresses his plan to make Twitter “a digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” and harrumphs in defense of all that is proper & good: “In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.”
For all practical purposes, that was the mission statement of Twitter under Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of the company. Digital town square. Wide range of beliefs debated. Warm and welcoming. That, give or take, is what Twitter’s always been. So — philosophically speaking, what the hell is it gonna be now that it wasn’t before?
Whatever compelled Musk to acquire Twitter as a business, he’ll never acquire what compels it as a social force. It’s too unruly, it borders on the ineffable; it shifts and morphs every day. Think of the bumperstickers extolling somebody anywhere to “KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD.” It’s a blanket cri de coeur to let one of America’s more progressive cities remain on its singular, iconoclastic path.
You could say much the same thing about Twitter. Its flaws, perversely enough, are fundamental to what makes it tick; its quirks and anomalies ultimately derive from the heady broth of daily and monthly active users, the ones who’ve given Twitter its perspectives and voices over the years. Twitter’s very populist unruliness helps make it what it is, better than Facebook or Instagram: the EKG of the modern world online.
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Musk has pledged to impose discipline, structure and order on a business that has had economic and management challenges in the past. But he brings to that lofty aspiration the harsh reality of his being unpredictable — aggressively so — and reveals intentions inconsistent with actions. For advertisers, that’s the Gordian knot to deal with now: seeing how Musk’s brash, erratic, showboat buccaneer business style introduces to Twitter a variant of the same dysfunction Musk purportedly acquired Twitter to correct.
Elon Musk has made the most of tapping into the wisdom of engineers. The wisdom of crowds — that wisdom (or folly) Twitter communicates globally every minute of every day of the year — is another matter entirely. He may have to learn that, or he may know it already. Whichever it is, he should come to grips with an equally inescapable fact of Twitter under his watch, and a uniquely compelling reason for Twitter users to stay put: We, the Twitterverse, are both the product he sells to advertisers and the object of desire for those same advertisers. For that reason, he needs us more than we need him.
That may be why, a year from now, the reactionary, archly conservative content-moderation policies we feared on his watch may amount to no more than trims and tweaks around the platform’s edges, with few substantive changes from the way it is today. A year from now, to our surprise, we may look back and see how little Elon Musk changed Twitter, and how much Twitter changed Elon Musk.
