Two reasons Elon Musk’s $44b gamble is doomed

Social media users moaning about the Tesla CEO buying Twitter have bypassed the supreme irony of their complaint.

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Twitter is dead. But not because Elon Musk killed it.

In fact all the tired old bolshy voices bitching and moaning about a quixotic billionaire buying a social media sewage stream have bypassed the supreme irony of their complaint. Musk didn’t kill Twitter, they did.

They did it with every humourless censorious condemnation of ordinary people they saw in the street but were too gutless to approach and so shamed them online.

They did it with their concerted efforts to “get it trending” and bombard people with abuse until they were hounded off the platform.

They did it with their lazy keyboard campaigns to get anyone they disagreed with literally banned from social media by the stroke of an algorithm or an oligarch’s e-pen.

Twitter used to be fun and they made it boring. And even after that they’re still whingeing.

This revelation was perhaps obvious all along but it came to me over the last week in a couple of seemingly unrelated epiphanies.

Elon Musk took full control of Twitter last week after finalising his $US44 billion takeover. Picture: Brendan Smialowski / AFP

The first occurred to me as I was pondering the 100-or-so-page findings of the Shergold Inquiry into Australia’s Covid response and wondering how we had all got it so wrong.

When I say “we” I am being very generic and generous. The report actually unequivocally confirms that I and a few other sane heads were in fact right all along. Covid was a problem, to be sure, but the closure of schools and the rolling lockdowns were irrational, disproportionate and unscientific responses that caused and are continuing to cause far greater human, social and economic damage than the virus itself.

And before the anti-vaxxers jump on their newly energised bandwagon, it is no vindication of them either. They were just as big a problem as the lockdown luvvies.

Vaccines were a sensible and highly effective response to Covid. Closing schools and playgrounds was not. Anyone who cannot hold these two facts in their head simultaneously is not a rational person.

An interesting case in point is the great pandemic of 1957. Never heard of it? No wonder, because the world didn’t stop. More than one million people in the world and more than 100,000 in the US died but schools stayed open and life continued as usual.

Instead President Eisenhower devoted the government’s energies to developing and rolling out a vaccine. Long story short, it worked. Estimates suggest perhaps a million American lives were saved while millions more went on unimpeded.

Likewise with Covid in the 21st century. The development and take up of the various vaccines has been a modern miracle. Those who refused or dragged their heels were a handbrake on recovery.

Twitter has more than 237 million daily active users. Picture: Lionel Bonaventure / AFP

So what’s the difference? Well in 1957 they had Elvis, not Twitter.

And in 2020 the social media site was positively overrun by lockdown lunatics desperately trying to outbid each other in a perverse virtue-signalling auction over who cared most about the fate of humanity. The harder the restrictions you called for, the more compassionate you were.

The fact that thousands of vulnerable and disadvantaged children across the nation have now disappeared from our schools shows you just how compassionate these overwhelmingly affluent and powerful “progressives” really are. They should hang their heads in shame but there is no angle low enough to account for the harm.

Worse still, the self-righteous authoritarianism of these elites not only oppressed normal sensible working people but also provoked a revolt from anti-vax conspiracy theorists who used this irrational overreach to justify their equally deluded and disproportionate fears.

And what turbo-charged this lunacy? Yep, our old friends at Tweet central.

That was the first revelation. The second came as I was listening to an interview with a charming historian who had written a history of the index.

This humble literary device, he rightly argued, was now the basis of not only every search engine query but of the mighty Twitter hashtag. After all, what is a hashtag but a handy reference guide to mentions of said subject?

But sadly for our learned friend the hashtag is no longer a collective reference point. It is almost exclusively deployed as a cudgel for users to declare #IstandwithDan or #nuptothecup or #bringbackmasks.

And that’s all fair enough. People should be free to say whatever they want — which, ironically again, is what many employers of such hashtags are arguing against.

Twitter is dead. But not because Elon Musk killed it. Picture: Philip Pacheco / AFP

But the thing about freedom is that people are also free to leave. And the problem with Twitter is that is what many sensible and moderate voices have already done. This is because it is a platform overrun by the extremes of the left and right — although most damningly by the extreme that claims to champion tolerance and diversity.

During Covid, my greatest Twitter crime was daring to criticise lockdowns and school closures. The Shergold report vindicates this absolutely.

My previous heresy was speaking out about the disproportionate domestic violence in disadvantaged and Indigenous communities — ridiculed by trendy Twitter types. Now, Four Corners has miraculously revealed it. Who knew?

But higher value targets have also fled for greener pastures. The ABC’s impeccable Leigh Sales deleted her account and departed her job after torrents of abuse, as did the equally balanced ex-ABC and Nine political editor Chris Uhlmann, while the eminently sensible Phil Coorey seems resigned to just posting links to his articles for the AFR.

They’re hardly the hate media but Twitter loves to hate nonetheless, not least craggy old former Fairfax and ABC hacks whose only outlet is taking dumps on anyone who isn’t a rich socialist boomer.

And so Twitter is dead, killed by its own dumb thumping hand. But at least in its death throes it’s finally managed to be funny again.

Originally published as Two reasons Elon Musk’s $44b gamble is doomed