Una Mullally: Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter makes a bad situation worse

Goodbye hellscape, hello hellscape. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter sounds a death knell of sorts. Like so many things careering towards rock bottom, the downfall of Twitter won’t happen in a single moment. The impact of the microblogging social media platform on discourse, distraction, disinformation, division, democracy and delight has been positive and negative, in multiple ways. However, alarm bells have been sounding for years.

It used to be that what happened on Twitter became the story, as hashtag culture moved conversations, accelerated social movements, and widened the landscape of social, political and cultural commentary. But now it’s Twitter’s direction under Musk that is the focus, and the implications of a large social media company becoming less transparent, less moderated, with its parameters set by the whims of a tech oligarch.

In the past, Twitter granted outsize influence to those with existing platforms, as well as offering a podium to those less represented in traditional media, across all demographics and viewpoints. But its broader cultural relevance was slumping long before Musk bought the company and he now owns a social media company that was already broken. While his grand plans may be stymied by practical realities, particularly regarding moderation and how advertisers will not want their products and messaging existing alongside toxic content, his chaotic approach will accentuate the platform’s negative attributes.

One of Twitter’s fundamental failures is that it never tackled its misogyny problem. Twitter didn’t invent misogyny, of course, but the reluctance to address the negative experiences of women on the platform allowed harmful discourse to keep spiralling. Woman users, particularly journalists, politicians and public figures with high follower counts, were left to deal with, at the very least, the daily grind of “reply guys”; those mostly male users who respond regularly to them in an over familiar and condescending way.

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They also have to deal with an intense and insidious array of silencing tactics. Sexist comments, pile-ons, gendered trolling, abuse, threats, harassment, doxxing – Twitter has never meaningfully confronted them. Its attempts to do so are always lukewarm and late. Women have a different experience on the platform to men. If a platform isn’t safe and free from harassment and abuse as a basic baseline, then its parameters are already warped, and everything that flows from that will be toxic.

Self-censorship

Twitter needs high-profile and high-follower-count accounts tweeting frequently, and yet there is always a paradox at play: the more popular you are, the worse the platform experience is. This makes no sense. For all the nonsense about “free speech”, there is no way to exist on the platform as someone with a lot of followers without censoring yourself, reducing engagement and ultimately quiet-quitting, if not leaving altogether. The platform is designed to instigate adversarial stances and reactionary backlash. Musk’s era will play to those who think that’s fun. But Twitter’s design and atmosphere already punishes those who give the platform influence in broader discourse, which is utterly counterproductive.

Alongside this, anxiety-inducing reply bombardments reduce the likelihood that people will express opinions that have an impact or prompt discussion. Getting heat and reaction doesn’t seem to bother people who enjoy negative attention, and see conflict as sport, but everyone else’s experience gets sullied as a result. When discourse is driven by heat and not light, everything ends up in “dumpster fire” territory.

Over the past five years or so within media, publishing, and entertainment, there was a growing perception that if you were merely Twitter famous – playing for retweets, likes and clout – it probably meant you were less influential or struggling to achieve relevance in areas of commentary that required more than takes and quips. That’s not universal, of course, and doesn’t go for those with Twitter fame as another string to their bow. It’s also true that Twitter initially created a space for people traditionally excluded from mainstream media to connect with audiences, and also amplifies stories mainstream media is slow to catch on to. People whose profiles grew from Twitter got opportunities, but that pipeline narrowed as the platform became more known for disinformation, polarised discourse and harassment.

As a mostly non-visual medium, Twitter got left behind as influencer culture grew on Instagram and TikTok. It is a platform hemmed in by its form. It has always struggled to make money. And there are serious questions about where new users will actually come from when the generation gap on Twitter is so profound compared to other platforms. And it’s not just the age profile of its active users, but how they act when they’re there. For all the chatter about Millennials and Gen Z narcissism, Twitter’s Gen X and Boomer cringe-factor is insurmountable for younger users. Like all social media platforms, it appeals to the ego and the desire to be seen, but spending time in a place typified by grandstanding snarkiness, pedantry and one-upmanship creates a wearing, embarrassing atmosphere cluttered with argumentative people you’d avoid at a party.

Ugly commentary

Twitter’s hands-off approach to ugly commentary turns people off. From right-wing disinformation to Trump’s megaphone tweeting, it is lately repeating its past mistakes by not adequately tackling transphobia, and the heightened, manufactured discourse around trans rights. Of course, Twitter isn’t alone in how it increased the depth and delusion of this “culture war”, but one of Twitter’s legacies is the amplification of a radicalised brand of transphobic UK pseudo-feminism that’s displaying an increasingly cultish, conspiracy mindset.

This “discourse” has found allies in everyone from Vladimir Putin (and we all know the history of Russian disinformation bots seeding division in democracies), to Maga, from far-right European movements to antifeminist religious fundamentalists. Musk is right about one thing, and that’s the number of spam bots and other bad bots on the platform. Not all bots are bad, obviously, but bot-driven amplification around conspiracy, disinformation, and spam more generally, creates a sense that the platform is, at least to some degree, inauthentically populated, with obvious negative consequences.

Twitter’s naive beginning as a place for open, almost democratic camaraderie was short-lived. It excelled as a destination when “something was happening”, especially when tracking global events. It still has a role in political organising, social movements and cultural commentary. But it has also been dying for a long time. We are entering a new era of social media, where older generations are struggling to find a digital sphere to call home. There are ample opportunities to build something better, because the very things Musk is in favour of – and his impulse towards trolling, immaturity and America-centric worldview – are the exact elements that wrecked Twitter as a platform.