For days, inside-the-Beltway folks were charmed by a roaming fox on the Capitol grounds. Then we learned that the fox had rabies. She’d fit right in with the Judiciary Committee!
The Plain View
When was it that our relatively predictable existence jumped tracks and became something concocted by a dystopian novelist with a sadistic sense of humor? Whenever it started, it’s here, and because of that, Elon Musk’s sudden purchase of more than 9 percent of Twitter and a subsequent invitation to join the board is not as shocking as it could have been. It’s just one more absurdity in our ongoing follies. Musk became the company’s biggest shareholder, not as an investment—his whole stake is spare change compared to his vast holdings in Tesla and SpaceX—but simply to mess with a platform that he likes to goof around on. At least he didn’t slap anyone.
The whole thing is a social media opéra bouffe. Musk originally registered with the SEC as a non-activist investor but quickly changed that. Activism is the point! Unlike Twitter’s previous activist interloper, Musk isn’t looking to toss out the CEO, Parag Agrawal, but instead wants to remake the product.
Despite posting more than 17,000 times on Twitter, Musk has far-ranging issues with the platform. One thing he wants considered is a crowd-pleaser—a way to edit tweets after posting. With an edit button, if you make a spelling error, or brashly promise to take your company private at $420 a share, you can quickly correct it. Musk introduced his wish in the form of a Twitter poll. Agrawal responded by saying the poll had important consequences and people should vote carefully. Though Agrawal intended it as a joke–Musk had used the same language himself in an earlier tweet–it was sad to see a CEO suddenly reduced to a spectator in his own company’s product decisions. (Twitter later attempted to reclaim its dignity by saying that an edit button is already in the works.)
More significantly, Musk also addressed how Twitter moderates its content. On March 25, he asked his followers to take a vote on whether Twitter adheres to the principle that “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.” That’s not-too-subtle code for asking whether Twitter is excessive in its attempts to keep the platform free of disinformation and hate speech. He got the result he undoubtedly was looking for: Over 70 percent of the 2 million respondents said no. He followed up by saying that this failure “fundamentally undermines democracy.”
That’s when the joke became serious. We are at a pivotal moment in the online world. The original free internet has morphed into a small collection of massive platforms run by digital behemoths who are charged with determining the limits of expression. (This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, by the way, which is about government controls of speech, not those private companies.) Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recently tweeted that he misses the days of the open web and bemoaned the takeover of people’s identities by the big corporations—and said he himself was partially to blame.
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This kind of thinking has led a sizable Silicon Valley contingent to argue for a decentralized structure called Web3 that returns control to users. In terms of content, the Web3 dream is having millions of people choosing among a range of algorithms that allow a range of what kind of speech they are OK with.
Musk seems to want Twitter to be the poster child for this approach. He hews to the libertarian view that people should be free to express even toxic speech, and those who don’t like it can leave the platform—or, maybe in the future, pick another algorithm.
But could that even work? One reason the big tech platforms became so popular was that they were so easy to use. Anyone involved in a tech product knows that the vast majority of users never bother to change a default setting. This idea is particularly risky for Twitter, which has failed to come close to a billion users, a number that its leaders thought attainable early in its history. A decentralized, roll-your-own version of Twitter might draw and retain even fewer users. Only a certain percentage of technically sophisticated Tweeters would have the expertise, enthusiasm, and motivation to go algorithm-shopping. Like Elon Musk.
So it’s not surprising that this approach is Musk’s passion. But while we can applaud his politicking for an edit button, we must also realize he is uniquely ill-positioned to offer product advice to Twitter. As a Twitter user, Musk is not like you and me. It’s a pretty rare bird who tweets to 80 million followers and has a rapid self-appointed army of defenders, an eager tech press treating his every utterance as news, and grumpy government regulators scrutinizing each tweet as if it were a financial prospectus.
The only analog for Musk’s Twitter experience I can think of is someone booted from the platform last year: Donald Trump. He too had millions of followers, an armada of hardcore admirers willing to attack his critics, and a press corp that amplified every outrageous exclamation. Trump, like Musk, made via tweets the kind of substantive announcements that lawyers or aides usually vet down to the last punctuation mark. To be sure, Musk’s posts don’t share Trump’s toxicity and are often funny without necessarily being mean. But Musk hyping the “free speech” issue indicates that if Twitter’s new board member has his way, the former president might be welcomed back to Twitter, picking up where he left off in arguing that he is the current president. Meanwhile, many other purveyors of misinformation on subjects like Covid and election fraud could flex this freedom to spread their lies. Also, those who have been cheering Twitter’s recent product changes to mitigate harassment and hate speech might be disappointed by a more hands-off approach.
One thing you can say about the dystopian novel we’re living in now—it’s not boring. As I write this, Musk is master-trolling, including a tweet with a picture of his toke on the Joe Rogan show, quipping, “Twitter’s next board meeting is going to be lit.” One must clear a high bar these days to elicit some big OMGs, but Musk has the impudence and the mojo to do it. I’m going to follow his account, and his activism, with a big bag of popcorn and a crash helmet.
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Time Travel
In 2009, I documented how the still-nascent Twitter was shaped by its users. Note that at the time, they figured that gaining a billion users was a cinch.
"I feel like we're 1 percent into this," [cofounder Biz] Stone says. "We don't want to be that child actor who finds success early and grows up to be weird."
But Twitter is already weird: It rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism that delivers instant opinion and eyewitness reporting on everything from presidential debates to football injuries. Though the company held a discussion earlier this year called "What Do We Want to Be When We Grow Up?" the mission statement is still a work in progress. "If there are three sentences I'd use to describe Twitter," Stone says, "one of them would be 'I don't know.'"
As the company pursues those billion users and a business model, however, it may need to move past a studied ignorance of what it wants to be and shape its product more aggressively. The challenge is to do that without alienating the very community that's fueling the company's rocket-ship ascent.
Ask Me One Thing
Emily writes, “CNN is free? Far from it. Are all WIRED readers cable subscribers?”
Thanks for the question, Emily, though I think it’s more of an official complaint, since you represent the network. True, last week’s newsletter talked about the not-plus version CNN as if it were a free service. I know, of course, that CNN viewers receive the channel as part of the pricey package charged by their cable providers. The reason I described it as such is that to those considering paying even more for a CNN+ subscription, the original feels free, since they aren’t charged for it specifically, they didn’t ask for it explicitly, and they must tolerate endless ads to get their fix of Wolf Blitzer. Also, the new service seems totally geared to those already enjoying CNN—that’s where the Plus comes in, right?
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I guess technically I could have framed it like this: “You already pay for Wolf Blitzer, now you can pay more!” In any case my main point was that the actual programming on this long-in-the-works new streaming service was rooted in the past. And by the way, the CNN+ TikTok account still has only one video and has yet to draw more than 500 views. Sad.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
Sean Penn went on Sean Hannity’s show this week. If you visit hell this week, pack your mittens!
Last but Not Least
A deep dive into how a Twitter edit button would work.
The epic quest to track the ill-gotten bitcoins of the world’s largest child sexual abuse ring.
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