The Thursday Night Massacre
Elon Musk has gone off the deep end and Twitter may never be the same. Plus, I'm Zoom Chatting at 12:30 today!
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to subscribe, you can sign up here.
Quick reminder that I’ll be Zoom Chatting today at 12:30. The link is here … see ya then.
Musk Agonistes
So this happened last night.
Twitter suspended the accounts of roughly half a dozen prominent journalists on Thursday, the latest change by the social media service under its new owner, Elon Musk.
The accounts suspended included Ryan Mac of The New York Times; Drew Harwell of The Washington Post; Aaron Rupar, an independent journalist; Donie O’Sullivan of CNN; Matt Binder of Mashable; Tony Webster, an independent journalist; Micah Lee of The Intercept; and the political journalist Keith Olbermann. It was unclear what the suspensions had in common; each user’s Twitter page included a message that said it suspended accounts that “violate the Twitter rules.”
Some of these journalists had tweeted about Twitter’s recent suspension of an account that tracks the movement of Elon Musk’s private jet. A few others had written articles critical of Musk and his brief but increasingly disastrous tenure as the owner of Twitter.
Then, later in the evening, Twitter began marking all links to the rival social network Mastodon as unsafe and even blocked Mastodon’s Twitter feed. After midnight, Musk jumped into a Twitter Spaces discussion about the bans, claimed that the suspended parties had doxxed him (which does not appear to be true), and then left the chat. Later the entire discussion, including its metadata was deleted.
It seems that having a paranoid and thin-skinned billionaire take over control of a popular social media site was not the best idea.
Up to this point, I’ve been relatively sanguine about Twitter’s long-term prospects. Musk’s incessant trolling is annoying and diminishes the site, but ultimately one could push that to the side and still have a pleasant, albeit highly curated, experience on Twitter.
After last night, I’m not so sure. If Twitter sets up arbitrary rules and then violates them based on one man’s whims, trust in Twitter will be fatally undermined. If he is arbitrarily banning journalists simply for doing their job and taking down news feeds that target him directly, then it places the efficacy of the platform in serious doubt. Journalists will be less likely to tweet stories about Musk and the company out of fear of retaliation. Users will increasingly lose confidence in the site, and I’d imagine many will simply log off (already, that’s starting to happen).
What is perhaps most remarkable about this latest turn of events is that Musk has been promoting the so-called “Twitter Files” investigations that chronicled Twitter’s internal deliberations on how to deal with misinformation — and remove users who incited violence (like President Trump). The files showed, or so Musk’s enablers claimed, that Twitter was not following its own rules and was making arbitrary decisions, influenced by the ideological priors of Twitter’s employees, to ban certain users and limit speech. Yet, Musk is now doing the exact thing he accused the previous leadership at Twitter of doing! If anything, his behavior is worse, because there doesn’t appear to be any anguished deliberation behind any of this decision-making. Now, it’s just one petulant man lashing out at his critics.
Personally, I’m inclined to stick around. For all its faults, Twitter is:
The single best aggregator for news and information.
The most effective tool for promoting my work.
Generally speaking, a very entertaining website.
Perhaps above all, I’ve built a community of friends and professional colleagues, and I would hate to lose access to them.
However, I am already spending less time on the site, and truth be told, the constant melodrama around Musk and his outbursts is draining. At some point, I may decide it’s simply not worth it.
As for Musk, I don’t think this ends well for him. To be clear, he owns Twitter and can do what he wants with it … but there are consequences for his actions. In just a few weeks, he has done enormous, potentially irreparable harm to Twitter’s brand. That he has gone so far out of his way to alienate a significant portion of the site’s user base is one of the bizarre and stupidest business decisions I’ve ever seen.
Beyond that, there is no way that the damage won’t seep over to his other brands. I’ll be honest, I’ve been in the market for an electric vehicle for some time, and I may purchase one soon. There’s no way in hell that I will buy a Tesla. I’m sure I’m not alone. The thing that is so bizarre about Musk’s actions is that by adopting the personae of a right-wing troll, he’s alienated the demographic group most likely to buy an electric car — affluent, white liberals. Does he think that the conservatives, whom he appears to be cultivating, will run out and start buying environmentally-conscious electric vehicles?
Already, Tesla’s stock price is taking a hit. It’s down 28 percent since Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter. Over the same time period, other car makers like Ford, GM, and Volkswagen have seen their stock prices rise slightly. I would be very surprised if Musk’s actions don’t continue to effect his other companies and even lead to heightened regulatory scrutiny of his business empire.
To be sure, I don’t really care about Musk’s other business. The electric vehicle industry will survice with or without Teslas. But I fervently hope Twitter can recover and the communities that have been built there will remain. Clearly, however, that isn’t going to happen as long as Musk is in charge. He is completely ill-suited to run it and handle the criticism and scrutiny that comes from owning a social media site. Unless he relinquishes control of the company or turns it over to a capable CEO, Twitter’s precipitous decline will only get worse. I fear that Thursday night’s melodrama is only the beginning.
It seems to me that the response to Elon Musk and the possible demise of Twitter is, in all due respect Mr. Cohen, way out of proportion when you compare these events to so many other events happening here and around the world at this time in history. To least a few the war in Ukraine, ongoing child poverty, lack of educational opportunities, environmental concerns, rampant homelessness, deteriorating health, and so on and so on. Must I say more. We still gave FB, Instagram, Snapchat, multiple news sources both on the Internet and elsewhere. What am I missing here?
“affect” not “effect”