Musk will find Mars a doddle next to Twitter

Tech tycoon’s quixotic spell in charge of the social media site has shown both its many flaws and how hard they are to fix, says Hugo Rifkind.

Tech tycoon’s quixotic spell in charge of the social media site has shown both its many flaws and how hard they are to fix.

We all remember Victor Kiam in the advertisements for electric razors, boasting that he liked his so much he bought the company. With Elon Musk and Twitter, it’s the opposite. He bought the company because he hated it. And he wanted, as he so often does, to save the world.

If this sounds mad and grandiose, then I’d remind you that this is Elon Musk we are talking about, so of course it does. Yet I can see, all the same, where he was coming from. Speaking recently to the American journalist Bari Weiss, he explained: “I did it because I was worried about the future of civilisation.” This weekend, after a month and a half of chaos, he ran a poll on the site about whether he should resign as chief executive. Almost 58 per cent of users who voted said he should. Poor civilisation, eh?

Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2022

We’ll come to what Musk got wrong in a moment, not that we’ll have room for most of it. First, though, let’s consider his aims. In his own words, he thought the social media firm had become contaminated by a “woke mind virus”. So, his plan was to end what he saw as political censorship on the site and, as importantly, to expose how rampant it had been.

The second part involved releasing Twitter’s internal files to a trio of journalists, Weiss among them. In the right-wing internet ecosphere, this has been dubbed the Twitter Files and likened to other huge whistleblowing stories of the past decade. In that mindset, Musk is Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. Although of course they both relied on leaks, whereas he just Victor Kiamed it.

You may have noticed that the Twitter Files have not had the impact of WikiLeaks. Some, including Musk, regard this as incompetence from traditional media, or perhaps a cover-up. Actually, though, it’s because all these releases have really told us is that running a social media company is a compromising, complicated nightmare.

There were three stories here, and forgive me for covering them briefly. The first concerned Twitter’s suspension of the New York Post over its story on the eve of the United States election in 2020 about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While Twitter was worried about its own culpability in affecting the vote, banning a newspaper was obviously an act of unforgivable overreach. Many Twitter employees, we now know, thought this too.

The second was about the banning of Donald Trump after the storming of the US Capitol, and how it might have breached Twitter’s internal guidelines. You know what? I don’t care. The guy was fomenting insurrection and we’re supposed to worry about the Ts&Cs? No.

The third story, though, is where it gets interesting. This was the one reported by Weiss about Twitter’s policy of quietly downgrading some right-wing voices. This was one of Musk’s big concerns and it does seem to have been happening. Some users simply found their prominence diminishing. They would tweet, but some users wouldn’t see it. The company called it “visibility filtering”. People would, covertly, be choked.

It’s important, all the same, to understand what we mean by “some right-wing voices”. We’re not talking fiscal conservatives here. It’s not like there was a blacklist for fans of grammar schools. Rather, we’re talking about inflammatory participants in the culture wars. Conspiracy theorists. Purveyors of what Twitter regarded, rightly or wrongly, as Covid disinformation. Users who, in reputational terms, were a headache. As one Twitter executive once put it, they were “trying to get the shitty people to not show up”. Crucially, we don’t know whether this only happened on the right, not least because, thanks to Musk’s many, many sackings, Twitter no longer has a functioning comms department to ask.

The main thing the Twitter Files show is that nobody at old Twitter really knew what they were doing. They were in new terrain, unclear of the distinction between politics and morals and miles from any coherent understanding of whether their responsibilities were similar to those of a newspaper or completely different - and that was with policy committees bursting from every ping-pong breakout area. So what hope did Musk have, all by himself?

His new Twitter has been a farce. One moment he’s trumpeting free speech, the next he’s banning journalists. One moment he’s ending “elitist” verification, the next he’s introducing whole new tiers of it. One moment he’s safeguarding children as “Priority #1”, the next he’s disbanding the advisory council that does just that.

Instead of advice, he has whims. When he caused uproar by briefly outlawing links to other social networks, his main defender on the site was his own mother. Half of his own pronouncements have been twee, right-wing internet jokes - “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” - delivered so impenetrably you’re never wholly sure they’re jokes at all. All of this he has done in a spirit of smirking, mischievous mayhem. Most of all, he has notably failed to agonise about the impact of any of it. Which, for all their faults, is not something you could say about his predecessors.

It would not be the worst thing in the world if Musk turned out to have spent dollars 44 billion to ride Twitter into the ground. He did, though, want to fix it. If somebody had tried to fix his beloved SpaceX in a similar manner, they’d have taken a Coke bottle out into the desert, pointed it at the stars and said: “How hard can it be?” But social media is the bleeding edge of internet man’s ability to get along with internet man, and the answer is “very”. Good luck to the new chief executive, if there is one, and good luck to Musk now he can refocus on saving civilisation by moving it to Mars. Relatively speaking, that one should be a doddle.

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