The Bird & The Technoking

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This is part four of a five part series on Elon Musk, Twitter, and how social media does and should work in a modern society. You can find the previous part here:

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The Bird & The Technoking

If you listen to Elon Musk or read his tweets you find that he likes the word “obviously”. Obviously¹ the media is overwhelmingly negative. Obviously² he overpaid for Twitter. Obviously³ whatever he is doing he should keep doing it. Obviously, the relationship between Musk and Twitter began before he bought the company, he has had an account since 2009. Of course, that relationship changed drastically when Musk decided to pursue buying the company in 2022. The saga began with Musk starting to buy a large amount of shares in Twitter in late January. By March 14^th Musk owned 9.2% of Twitter’s shares⁴ which the media reported⁵ to be the single largest holding any one person or institution had in Twitter at that time. By April 5^th then-CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted⁶: “He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!” As is his wont, Musk placed⁷ a bid for the company at $54.20, a reference to marijuana in April 2022, and Musk had the following to say about the deal: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated […] I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

The pitch sounds like a mix of an ideological commitment to free speech and a product focused turn-around investment play. It is an almost typical private equity deal where the buyer raises money from outside investors in order to buy a currently unsuccessful company with borrowed money in the hope of using its industry connections and managerial know-how to improve the acquired company with an eye to selling it later at a higher valuation. As discussed in ‘The Man’ this investment strategy is familiar to Musk as it is basically what he did with Tesla. One of the important differences between Tesla and Twitter was of course that Twitter had a commercial product already launched, and that Musk was not the only one buying into Twitter. Reuters reported⁸ in October 2022 that there are 19 equity investors in Twitter in addition to Musk himself. The charitable interpretation of Musk’s tenure as CEO and owner of Twitter is that these investors put pressure on him to think primarily about the financial returns of the deal, impinging on his ability to pursue his ideological agenda to the fullest. That narrative is somewhat strengthened when you consider that the deal was also financed with $13 billion from a consortium of seven banks. As the saying goes: if you owe the bank $1 million you have a problem, if you owe the bank $1 billion the bank has a problem. Elon Musk is stuck between his 19 equity investors and seven banks with 13 billion dollar problems which limits his room for manoeuvre.

In light of the complex finances behind the takeover it makes some sense for Musk to have second thoughts about the deal. Musk tried to get out of the deal before it went through by citing a higher share of bots compared to real humans than he had expected. How many bots there are on Twitter is not very important to those who engage with Twitter primarily as a way to follow politics, sports, music, or the news. Except in the ways it generally makes a platform hostile to its users to encounter spam. But for an advertiser the more bots there are on a platform the bigger the risk becomes that your adverts are shown to a bot which will never buy your product, no matter how slick your marketing is. If you are charged the same for an impression from a bot as from a human, then the share of accounts on a platform which are bots becomes highly relevant.

Twitter was having none of it. Musk sued to get out of the deal, which he promptly lost. Here is Twitter’s response⁹ to Musk’s claims in their lawsuit to compel him to complete the purchase: “According to Musk, he – the billionaire founder of multiple companies, advised by Wall Street bankers and lawyers – was hoodwinked by Twitter into signing a $44 billion merger agreement. That story is as implausible and contrary to fact as it sounds. And it is just that – a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive once the stock market – and along with it, his massive personal wealth – declined in value. After spending months looking for an excuse to get out of the contract, Musk claimed to terminate it, explaining his supposed reasons for doing so in a July 8 letter to Twitter. When Twitter sued to enforce its rights and exposed the weakness of those reasons, Musk spent weeks coming up with more supposed reasons – the Counterclaims – which offer up an entirely new set of excuses for his breach. The Counterclaims are a made-for-litigation tale that is contradicted by the evidence and common sense. Musk invents representations Twitter never made and then tries to wield, selectively, the extensive confidential data Twitter provided him to conjure a breach of those purported representations . Yet Musk simultaneously and incoherently asserts that Twitter breached the merger agreement by stonewalling his information requests.”

Make of this what you will. To some, Musk’s actions were justified as the number of bots on a social media platform is highly relevant for advertisers, Twitter’s primary clients. To others, the number of bots is a tertiary concern if Musk really did buy the platform for ideological reasons. The man does not rely on Twitter to make his living, so it is reasonable to assume that Musk could have subsidised Twitter with the profits of his other ventures to focus on his vision of free speech in the digital age if he wished to. Added to which, as we explored in The Man, Musk has lied about taking a public company which he is a major shareholder in private before, and he has a settlement¹⁰ with the SEC to prove it. So it is reasonable to ask whether he ever actually wanted to buy Twitter. Indeed, there were scores of people online and in the media giving their take on the extent to which Musk was serious about his professed beliefs. Ultimately that discussion turned out to be moot as Musk did end up completing the purchase. Still, it is noteworthy that this ostensibly selfless and ideologically driven purchase was being called into question over what is fundamentally a commercial concern.

After many twists and turns, Twitter won the battle to enforce the merger agreement and Musk formally took control¹¹ of Twitter on October 28^th 2022, announcing the transition of power by tweeting¹²: “the bird is freed”. Two days prior Musk had visited Twitter’s headquarters on Market Square in San Francisco carrying a sink. “Let that sink in” the tweet¹³celebrating the occasion reads. It is fair to say that Musk made a memorable and unusual entrance, but the light tone at Market Square would not last. With majority voting rights in hand Musk and his coterie could make any changes they wanted, and they certainly wanted change. The first order of business was to reorganise Twitter’s leadership. After just a week most of the C-suite and corporate board had been replaced¹⁴ with Musk’s hand-picked candidates, or perhaps loyalists. Some left by choice, many were fired. Business Insider reported¹⁴ on November 25^th 2022, about a month after Musk gained control of the company, that 14 executives had left the company, half of their own will and half fired by Musk. Senior roles like the CEO, CFO, general counsel are hard to quickly replace in any business, but Musk also got rid of roles more specific to Twitter too, such as the company’s general manager for core technologies and its global head of advertising sales. But the revolution was not contained to the board room and corner offices – after the first month in charge Musk and company had fired¹⁵ over 3000 of Twitter’s staff ranging from programmers to content moderators, and after six months the figure¹⁶ had risen to about 6500, or some 85% of the employees at the time of the acquisition.

When hearing about corporate bloodbaths like the one at Twitter it is easy to feel removed.  The stereotype of San Francisco tech workers – drinking kombucha on tap at the office waiting for their stock options to vest – can be more difficult to empathise with than blue collar workers who are fired when a steel mill is closed. But those are real people whose lives were upended because of the schemes of a man several orders of magnitude more wealthy than them. And do not think that those who kept their jobs during the initial cull could rest easy. Accounts abound of work place conditions which would make union bosses shudder. One of the more high profile cases and a symbol for the arbitrariness of the new regime is that of Haraldur Thorleifsson¹⁷, a programmer who was locked out of Twitter’s systems. Figuring he may have been fired, he tweeted at Musk and got into an exchange where Musk publicly criticised him. During said exchange, Thorleifsson received an email informing him that he was no longer employed at Twitter. Shortly thereafter, Musk tweeted: “I would like to apologize to [Thorleifsson] for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful. He is considering remaining at Twitter.” Another is of Yao Yue who was fired after Musk’s decision to end working from home effective immediately. Yue wrote¹⁸ “Don’t resign, let him fire you”, and was soon fired herself. Perhaps the best example of an arbitrary, and counter-productive firing was when Musk fired one of its two most principal engineers over receiving bad news. As reported by Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton in The Verge¹⁹: “One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning. […] Musk did not take the news well. ‘You’re fired, you’re fired,’ Musk told the engineer.”

The working conditions at Twitter is only tangentially relevant to our broader discussion of how society should handle social media, but it provides some insight into how Musk sees the business. His actions do not look like those of someone with a reverence for the dispassionate and impersonal rule of systems and institutions, but of those of someone who believes in the passion and merit of a single individual decision maker. Curious how often those who espouse such views are completely assured in their own merits and intelligence, and quick to doubt the merits and intelligence of others.

For our purposes, the most consequential firing comes after the disastrous launch of Twitter Blue. The idea was to establish a new revenue stream separate and distinct from advertising. Which is a good idea if you care about Twitter’s social role, at least in principle. In November 2022, some two weeks after taking control of Twitter Musk tweeted²⁰: “Far too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months”. The blue checkmarks in question were the symbol on Twitter confirming that the user was who they claimed to be; a handy feature on a platform where changing one’s display name and profile picture is easy and costless. Musk’s primary objection with the legacy checkmarks was that the process of getting one was organised by Twitter, leaving it up to the company to decide who was important enough to be ‘verified’ and conversely who was not. Musk had previously called²¹it a “lords & peasants system”, implying that the point of the system was to award prestige to favoured people and groups rather than a way to combat the type of misinformation by political actors we briefly mentioned in “The Bird” when Republicans set up fake accounts to impersonate and discredit political rivals.

Musk was going to democratise verification by moving from a centralised system where Twitter acted as an arbiter to a decentralised system where individuals could choose to get themselves verified for the low, low price of $8 a month. Twitter’s own trust and safety team was not onboard with the idea, as reported¹⁵ by The Verge: “Twitter’s trust and safety team compiled a seven-page document outlining the dangers associated with paid verification. What would stop people from ­impersonating politicians or brands? They ranked the risk a ‘P0,’ the highest possible. But Musk and his team refused to take any recommendations that would delay the launch.” As the team predicted, the launched was mired in controversy as impersonations became rife. The most famous was when an impersonator claiming to be pharmaceutical giant Eli Lily tweeted²²: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now”, leading to a drop in the company’s share price.

The reason²³ why the verification system was implemented in the first place was that public figures including Kanye West and Steven Tyler were impersonated when Twitter was a new platform, leading to several lawsuits in 2009. Not only was the debacle predicted by Twitter itself, it had already happened. In the aftermath Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety resigned¹⁵, in a story which would repeat; in June 2023 his replacement Ella Erwin resigned²⁴ too. It then took the company until April 2024 to replace²⁵ Erwin. Furthermore, the company’s Trust and Safety Council, the body of independent organisations which advised the company on content moderation issues including self-harm, child abuse, and hate speech was dissolved²⁶ in December 2022. X still references the council on its website²⁷, stating: “While drafting policy language, we gather feedback from a variety of internal teams as well as our Trust & Safety Council.” At the time of writing, it does not appear like a replacement was ever instituted, when asked for comment X Inc did not respond²⁸.

But even if there is a new and improved safety council – Musk renamed it saying²⁹:“Any organization that puts ‘Trust’ in their name cannot trusted, as that is obviously a euphemism for censorship” – it would just be a façade, a Potemkin village to placate the critics. If the CEO and the largest shareholder have the unequivocal power to fire the nominally independent content moderation council, then it is about as independent as a North Korean election official. The threats to the council members’ jobs are not hypothetical, as Musk has repeatedly and ostentatiously demonstrated. In the aftermath of Yoel Roth’s resignation as Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Musk accused Roth of being sympathetic to paedophilia; The Verge reports¹⁵ that Roth felt unsafe to the point of leaving his home in the ensuing hate storm. Any new council will no doubt be aware of the Sword of Damocles hanging over them, and will make very sure that the boss will agree with any decisions before they are made.

The lack of independent review in Twitter’s policies becomes obvious when you see the ways in which Musk bends the rules to benefit himself. He states again and again that Twitter should hew close to the law and avoid making content moderation choices that go beyond what is legally necessary. Those laxer rules have led to controversial right-wing figures, including David Duke³⁰ a former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, and Tommy Robinson, a nationalist firebrand associated with the summer 2024 violent anti-immigration protests in the UK, being allowed back on the platform after having been banned by the ancien regime. At the same time he has also banned about a dozen American journalists who were not engaging in any illegal behaviour.

Musk has long been critical of accounts which track his private plane. The account @ElonJet used publicly available information to track where Elon Musk’s private jet was, which evidently made Musk uncomfortable. CNBC reported³¹that Jack Sweeny, who ran the account, was at one point offered $5 000 to shut it down. When Musk bought Twitter he had this³² to say about @ElonJet: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”. That commitment turned out to be rather less firm than Musk claimed. By December 2022, a mere month after explicitly saying he would not ban @ElonJet the account was banned³⁰. It is obviously not a good look to so quickly make a U-turn on a commitment, especially given how often Musk emphasises his dedication to freedom of speech, but the stated reason for banning the account – posing a potential security threat to celebrities – is not totally invalid.

But the story does not simply end with one banned account and one broken promise. In the days following the ban of @elonjet Twitter went on to ban³³ amongst others Ryan Mac, Donie O’Sullivan, Drew Hartwell, Micah Lee, Matt Binder, Aaron Rupar, and Tony Webster – tech journalists from The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, The Intercept, and Mashable respectively. Their offense? According to Musk, doxing and “ban evasion”. The journalists wrote stories about Musk going back on his word and banning @elonjet, and as part of their work they linked to the primary source and root of the story: the @elonjet acoount. Here is Musk’s justification³⁴ of the bans at the time: “They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service”. Never mind the fact that the location of private jets is publicly available information, or that the location of a jet is at best a proxy for the owner’s location; the fact that Musk implies that journalists are wilfully, intentionally putting his life at risk is highly troubling. Whether or not Musk intended to silence critics in the media, the direct effect of the bans is to chill discussions of Elon’s jet, even though it is no doubt worth asking why someone so devoted to decarbonising the auto industry to save the environment flies as much as he does. And disdain for the media is not a one off occurrence for Musk either. Indeed, Vanity Fair reported³⁵ in April 2023 that Twitter continued to ban journalists. The December 2022 bans were reversed after a poll run on Musk’s Twitter, but some of the journalists did not get unbanned. Notably Linette Lopez, a Business Insider columnist who had been critical of Tesla is still not unbanned³⁶.

In addition, Musk has had conflicts with both the Brazilian supreme court and Australian courts regarding what is allowable on Twitter. The Australian eSafety Commissioner ordered³⁷ social media sites to remove a video of an Australian bishop being stabbed in a violent attack in Brisbane during a church service. Twitter complied by making the video inaccessible on the Australian version of the site, but decided to keep hosting it for the rest of the world. The eSafety Commissioner found that to be insufficient and ordered Twitter to completely delete the video, which Musk promptly denounced as censorship. Musk wrote on Twitter³⁸: “Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet? We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA.” It is certainly laudable to fight against censorship, but the sharing of violent attacks on living people is a difficult issue. On one hand it is useful for journalists to be able to see what really happens in violent conflicts, in peacetime and wartime alike. On the other hand, it might reasonably ruin your day to see a violent stabbing when you were trying to scroll Twitter in peace; not to mention the potential harms to the real living person whose attempted murder is viewable on the digital public square.

Similarly, Musk has been in a public fight³⁹ with Alexandre de Moraes, one of the Justices on the Brazilian Supreme Court. Twitter has refused to block the accounts of figures implicated in the insurrection at the Brazilian capital after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio da Silva in January 2023. In a classic Musk move, his response⁴⁰ was unproportionate to the request made by the Court: “Coming shortly, 𝕏 will publish everything demanded by [de Moraes] and how those requests violate Brazilian law. This judge has brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil. He should resign or be impeached. Shame [de Moraes], shame.” Just like in the Australian case there is a real, nuanced discussion to be had regarding the power governments should have over the social media accounts of its citizens and politicians. But Musk’s rhetoric rings hollow when he is so prone to the exact behaviour he decries as censorship.

In light of Musk’s issues with following the rules he himself sets, and the way his fanbase engenders groupthink it makes perfect sense to step back from the day to day running of Twitter and focus on the larger vision. As mentioned in “The Man” Musk has a lot on his plate with several concurrent CEO titles, a large family, philanthropic pursuits, and often lawsuits to deal with.  In one of the more famous episodes from Musk’s tenure as CEO of Twitter he started a poll⁴¹ on whether or not he should step down – tweeting: “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll” – which he promptly lost. With 17.5 million votes cast, ‘yes’ won with 57.5% of the votes. Was he upset about the result? Two days later he was tweeting⁴² about changing the rules to only allow Twitter Blue subscribers to vote on policy issues. The person he eventually picked to succeed him was traditional media veteran Linda Yaccarino who took over in June of 2023.

Yaccarino was not well known outside the advertising industry so it became common for journalists to run stories titled something along the line of ‘who is Linda Yaccarino?’ when the announcement of the new CEO became public. By November 2023 Wired’s Vittoria Elliott asked⁴³ “Where the Hell Is X CEO Linda Yaccarino?” Musk relinquished the CEO title, but he did not step away from the company – neither as a user nor as a decision maker. Elliott wrote: “In an all-hands meeting last week, the transcript of which was published by The Verge, Musk said almost twice as much as Yaccarino—3,735 words to her 1,833. Yes, we counted. Parts of the all-hands read more as Yaccarino interviewing Musk about his vision for an everything app than as a CEO discussing their own.” Hardly a clean break from a controversial CEO. Musk also retained the role of executive chair of the company’s board of director and took the role of CTO, chief technology officer, when he stepped down as CEO.

Being both subordinate and superior to someone is difficult for anyone, but Musk is especially difficult to manage. Indeed, official news about Twitter and its features are regularly announced not by a corporate account or the CEO but the board’s executive chairman. There is yet to be a public conflict with Yaccarino taking point; it is always Musk who publicly represents Twitter. Yaccarino did not take a public stance on the issue of whether the Australian stabbing video should be allowed on global Twitter, nor on whether or not it is right to ban politicians implicated in the Brazilian insurrection, or indeed any other high profile policy question which would have a lasting impact on the global digital town square. The perception becomes that Yaccarino is a weak leader beholden to Musk. Which other CEO would allow their subordinates to pick public fights with regulators in major markets like Australia and Brazil on behalf of their company? Which other CEO would let the chairman of the company’s board interfere with the day to day running of the company?

This begs the question, why did Musk relinquish the CEO title to Yaccarino? One option is simply that Musk cares deeply about democracy; “vox populi vox dei” as he likes to say. Another is that Yaccarino faces the “glass cliff” phenomenon⁴⁴where women are more likely to get the top job when an organization is trouble, as appointing someone different from the last leader (most commonly white men) better communicates an attempt to change. The issue of course, is that women, and minorities, who faces the glass cliff are often set up to fail by the errors of the previous leadership and tend to get more personal blame for the organization’s issues than the previous leader. And as discussed, there have been a bevy of issues at Twitter both before and after Yaccarino took over. If Twitter goes bankrupt, it would be useful for Musk’s reputation to have someone else to blame.

That may be a cynical response, but remember, Musk did fight the Tesla founders in court⁴⁵ over the claim of Musk founding the company; he is clearly a man who values his reputation. That reputation has not withstood the tests of the Twitter takeover. Musk’s imperious tendencies are almost expected in endeavours like SpaceX, how else could a CEO step on the toes of the most powerful states in the world and their well-funded space programmes? But the idea of helming the digital public square is a fundamentally different challenge. Hierarchy and discipline is required to make sure a space launch is successful and safe, but is the antithesis of healthy public debate. Musk’s reputation as a force for good – someone who cares about the future of humanity and someone who wants to save the planet – has been a liability at Twitter. His fans expected Twitter under Musk to be more than just a business venture, it was billed as social reform via the corner office. In reality though, the attempts of forging new norms and taking a new stance on freedom of speech has been intermittent at best.

Modern western society tends to conceive of freedom of speech as a right for individuals to speak their mind, as opposed to how early liberals like John Locke saw freedom of speech as protection from prosecution and persecution for speaking up against the state, which often practically meant the royalty. Musk did not make it clear which conception of freedom of speech he considers himself a proponent of, so people of all political stripes imagined that their favourite or least favourite version of freedom of speech was the one he meant depending on how they feel about the man. Banning journalists, jet trackers, and comedians for speech which falls outside the scope of hate speech while also letting a Klu Klux Klan member back on the site muddies the waters. The only consistent maxim post-takeover Twitter has held to is that whatever Elon Musk says goes. And more often than not, Musk says to ban those who make fun of him, criticise him, or scrutinise him. His version of free speech sure seems like lèse-majesté for the digital age. The Technoking title is not for nothing.

No other social media platform fares that much better than Twitter, they all make mistakes and enforce their policies inconsistently. That is practically inevitable when a large and diverse group of people have to make judgement calls about what is and is not allowed. What is different, and worse, at Twitter is the naked self-serving bent there is to Twitters content moderation. In a society where people are supposed to be treated equally and where speaking truth to power is a virtue it is jarring to see someone be able to arbitrarily and capriciously enforce the rules to silence their critics and boost their fans. In democracies there is no place for a king except on postcards and at ribbon cutting ceremonies, but apparently the kingship for the digital town square can be bought. That is the worst part about Musk owning Twitter. Not that he specifically owns it and can do with it as he wishes, but that it was up for sale in the first place. It is grotesque to hear someone call Twitter “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated” and to follow that up by saying that they want to buy it. What does it say about a person that they want to own the public forum?

More than the digital lèse-majesté, Musk truly is the Techno-King of Twitter, and like all monarchies the Technomonarchy suffers from the lottery of merit. Imagine that your preferred candidate for Techno-king of Twitter had bought it instead, someone real or imagined who fulfils all your criteria for a benevolent dictator of the internet. Would they be better at running it than a system which distributes power so that no one person get complete control, where content moderation issues are handled by a panel of independent experts with different ideological viewpoints? Perhaps, but Elon Musk sure is not that ideal candidate. Like a king of old Musk did not get to rule Twitter because of merit. Nor because of a mandate from the public. Is that the system we want for governing social media?

While it is easy to picture someone better than Musk to run Twitter, it is also easy to picture someone worse. With the power social media has to direct the public debate it would be possible for someone running Twitter to make changes to an algorithm to favour their ideological agenda. Or to enforce the rules more strictly for their ideological opponents, journalists, and critics. To take down any posts critical of the government. As petty and hostile to journalists as Twitter can be, most controversies and scandals during Musk’s ownership of the platform boil down to abusing the platform’s systems to benefit himself. He has so far not made any real efforts to redefine how social media should handle free speech. A trite joke about Musk has been asking if he is absolutely for or absolutely against free speech, but the reality is clearly neither. He is against people criticising him and his businesses and associates, and shows almost no inclination to regulate speech in any other field.

It is easy to fall into the trap of overstating the effects of having a dictatorial leader of Twitter. Sure, content moderation has become more erratic and the highest goal is looking out for anyone disparaging the boss, but ultimately the globe keeps spinning. But as discussed in ‘The Dilemma’ the network effects inherent in social media create a strong centralising force which tends to elect one platform to be the champion of a certain medium, as there are increasing marginal returns of more users. Finding people who have quit Twitter since Musk’s takeover is easy, and finding people who disparage how far the site has fallen since October 2022 but are still on it is even easier. Yet rivals like Mastodon, Truth Social, Bluesky, and Parler have all failed to take Twitter’s crown. Even one of the industry’s giants Mark Zuckerberg has failed to overtake it with his Threads, even with the full support of Meta behind it. So while it is not a huge deal that Musk owns Twitter in the big picture, it is an looks likely to remain a sea change in the world of social media.

Social media is in that way a highly strange industry. Which other industry has so many competitors unable to gain market share when the industry leader is shedding staff by the thousands and upsetting its core userbase? It is also a business with an unusual amount of power. Unlike automakers or management consultants the public has a vested interest in the day to day running of a social media, and like with elected offices a change in the leadership of a social media can have practical implications for the general public. Therefore, the social media business cannot be regulated nor run the same way you would in other industries. Musk’s leadership at Twitter is a case study in why. Musk did not just buy a company but also a culturally significant institution. Unlike most such institutions though, Twitter is almost truly global. And unlike most cultural institutions, there is no alternative which has a good chance at being what Twitter was at its peak.

There are businesses which are more than profit generators, which serve social and/or political functions in addition to their for-profit work like defence lawyers and newspapers. It is not a case of capitalism pushing business towards anti-social outcomes, indeed the best newspapers tend to operate in capitalist economies. But societies should attempt to find a way to regulate social media in a way which mitigates its most harmful tendencies while preserving its greatest benefits. One vital aspect of such regulation is to recognise the inherent political power that comes with being the censor or curator of online speech. It can be done. Newspapers and other journalistic endeavours have been able to turn a profit and benefit society through scrutinising the powerful and informing the masses since the mid-1800’s. A similar balance can be found with social media. But that requires us as a society to decide that it is desirable and worthwhile to do so. Hopefully the highly erratic and arbitrary rule of Musk can convince us that it needs doing.

If we had properly considered what role social media generally, and Twitter specifically played in our modern media diet perhaps we would have realised that it should not have been up for sale in the first place. The issue is not that someone you or I dislike and distrust is in charge of Twitter, it is that it was up for sale in the first place. If Musk had bought a newspaper or TV station you could at least switch to a competitor, but there is no true alternative to Twitter. The centralising force of network effects in social media coupled with the corporate governance structure of Twitter centralises an awful lot of power in Elon Musk, and whatever you think of the man isn’t it fair to say that a more decentralised leadership model would be better if the goal is to encourage a healthy pro-social debate about matters vital to the future of humanity?

If you believe that Twitter serves a social function then is it unreasonable to ask that it is governed in accordance with our principles? If we do not accept monarchs in other areas of our lives why should there be a Technoking of the digital town square? Obviously, digital lèse-majesté rules are bad for open debate. Obviously, firing the majority of your content moderation team leads to more harassment and discrimination. Obviously, no one should be the Technoking of the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are discussed.

Next Chapter: The Twist

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Sources:

The Bird & The Technoking

¹ Levin, Tim. ”Elon Musk Says Media Is ’obviously Overwhelmingly Negative’ and He Loves Twitter Because It Lets Him Get His Message Directly to People”. Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-buying-twitter-media-negative-bias-2022-6. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

² Spangler, Todd. ”Elon Musk Says He’s ‘Obviously Overpaying’ for Twitter in $44 Billion Deal but Sees Huge Upside Long-Term”. Variety, 20 oktober 2022, https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-twitter-obviously-overpaying-deal-1235409500/.

³ Press, Craig Trudell, Dana Hull,The Associated. ”Tesla Board in Familiar Position with Elon Musk Drug Accusations as He Gloats: ’Whatever I’m Doing, I Should Obviously Keep Doing It!’” Fortune, https://fortune.com/2024/01/08/elon-musk-drug-use-tesla-board-lsd-ketamine-journal-report/. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

⁴ SCHEDULE 13G. Twitter Inc, 14 mars 2022, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922041911/tm2211482d1_sc13g.htm. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION.

⁵ News, A. B. C. ”A Timeline of Elon Musk’s Tumultuous Twitter Acquisition”. ABC News, https://abcnews.go.com/Business/timeline-elon-musks-tumultuous-twitter-acquisition-attempt/story?id=86611191. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

⁶ Agrawal, Parag. ”Welcome Elon!” X (formerly Twitter), 05 april 2022, https://x.com/paraga/status/1511320964813910017.

⁷ Inc, Twitter. Elon Musk to Acquire Twitter. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elon-musk-to-acquire-twitter-301532245.html. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

⁸ ”Who Is Financing Elon Musk’s $44 Billion Deal to Buy Twitter?” Reuters, 07 oktober 2022. www.reuters.com, https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/who-is-financing-elon-musks-44-billion-deal-buy-twitter-2022-10-07/.

⁹ PLAINTIFF’S REPLY TO VERIFIED COUNTERCLAIMS, Twitter Inc v. ELON R. MUSK, X HOLDINGS I, INC., and X HOLDINGS II, INC. COURT OF CHANCERY OF THE STATE OF DELAWARE, 04 augusti 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20230326214307/https:/s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_news/2022/08/Twitters-Reply-to-Verified-Counterclaims.pdf.

¹⁰ SEC.gov | Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges; Tesla Charged With and Resolves Securities Law Charge. 27 May 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20200527074308/https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226.

¹¹ ”Musk Begins His Twitter Ownership with Firings, Declares the ’Bird Is Freed’”. Reuters, 28 oktober 2022. www.reuters.com, https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/elon-musk-completes-44-bln-acquisition-twitter-2022-10-28/.

¹² Musk, Elon ”the bird is freed”. X (Formerly Twitter), 28 oktober 2022, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585841080431321088?lang=en.

¹³ Musk, Elon ”Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” X (formerly Twitter), okt 2022, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1585341984679469056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1585341984679469056%7Ctwgr%5E6beaa66c0fcebf9227d02ab7fdca9f0581785e8d%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Fmarkets%2Fdeals%2Felon-musk-tweets-he-is-twitters-headquarters-2022-10-26%2F.

¹⁴ Lee, Sam Tabahriti, Grace Dean, Lloyd. ”From CEO Parag Agrawal to Robin Wheeler and Yoel Roth, These Top Twitter Execs Have Been Fired, Laid off, or Quit since Elon Musk’s Takeover”. Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-executives-fired-quit-takeover-agrawal-segal-edgett-2022-11. Åtkomstdatum 27 oktober 2024.

¹⁵ Heath, Alex. ”Inside Elon’s “Extremely Hardcore” Twitter”. The Verge, 17 januari 2023, https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji.

¹⁶ Clayton , James. ”Musk on hate speech, Twitter lay-offs and sleeping in the office”. BBC, 12 april 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65247272/page/2.

¹⁷ ”Elon Musk Apologizes after Mocking Disabled Twitter Employee”. AP News, 08 mars 2023, https://apnews.com/article/twitter-musk-iceland-fired-wheelchair-haraldur-employee-0329405846dac8f1f08ac55594881bb6.

¹⁸ Eidelson,Bloomberg, Josh. ”Elon Musk Fired an X Employee over a Social Media Post Protesting RTO Orders and He Was Right to, Lawyer Says”. Fortune, https://fortune.com/2024/01/30/remote-work-return-to-office-twitter-x-elon-musk-fires-employee-social-media-post/. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

¹⁹ Newton, Casey. ”Elon Musk’s Reach on Twitter Is Dropping — He Just Fired a Top Engineer over It”. The Verge, 09 februari 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns.

²⁰ Musk, Elon ”Far too many corrupt legacy Blue “verification” checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months”. X (formerly Twitter), https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1590757322149998592?s=20. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

²¹ Musk, Elon ”Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.” X (formerly Twitter), 01 november 2022, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1587498907336118274.

²² Eli Lilly and Company. ”We are excited to announce insulin is free now”. X (Formerly Twitter), 10 november 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20221110200413/https:/twitter.com/EliLiIlyandCo/status/1590775525487906857.

²³ Rao, Leena. ”Facing A Lawsuit And Complaints From Celebs, Twitter Launches Verified Accounts”. TechCrunch, 06 juni 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-complaints-from-celebs-twitter-launches-verified-accounts/.

²⁴ ”Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety Says She Has Resigned”. Reuters, 02 juni 2023. www.reuters.com, https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitters-head-trust-safety-says-she-has-resigned-2023-06-02/.

²⁵ ”Elon Musk’s X Appoints New Safety Chiefs as It Seeks to Rebuild Ads Business”. NBC News, 02 april 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-x-appoints-new-safety-chiefs-rcna146050.

²⁶ Charities’ Dismay as Twitter Disbands Safety Group. 13 december 2022. www.bbc.com, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63907708.

²⁷ Our approach to policy development and enforcement philosophy. X, https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/enforcement-philosophy.

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²⁹ Musk, Elon ”Exactly”. X (formerly Twitter), 11 mars 2024, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1767273166374633895.

³⁰ Milmo, Dan, och Dan Milmo Global technology editor. ”Elon Musk Offers General Amnesty to Suspended Twitter Accounts”. The Guardian, 24 november 2022. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/24/elon-musk-offers-general-amnesty-to-suspended-twitter-accounts.

³¹ Capoot, Ashley. ”Twitter Suspends Account Dedicated to Tracking Elon Musk’s Private Jet”. CNBC, 14 december 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/14/twitter-suspends-elonjet-account-that-tracks-elon-musks-private-jet-.html.

³² Musk, Elon ”My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”. X (formerly Twitter), 07 november 2022, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456.

³³ Lopatto, Elizabeth. ”Elon Musk Starts Banning Critical Journalists from Twitter”. The Verge, 16 december 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-starts-banning-critical-journalists-from-twitter.

³⁴ Musk, Elon ”They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service”. X (formerly Twitter), 16 december 2022, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1603587970832793600.

³⁵ Ecarma, Caleb. ”Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Still Banning Journalists for Simply Doing Their Job”. Vanity Fair, 20 april 2023, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-still-banning-journalists.

³⁶ Zhuang, Yan, och Euan Ward. ”Twitter Reinstates Suspended Accounts of Several Journalists”. The New York Times, 17 december 2022. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/business/media/twitter-reinstates-accounts.html.

³⁷ Conger, Kate. ”Elon Musk Clashes With Australian Court Over Violent Videos on X”. The New York Times, 24 april 2024. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/technology/elon-musk-videos-x-australia-court.html.

³⁸ Musk, Elon ”Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian “eSafety Commissar” is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?” X (formerly Twitter), 23 april 2024, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1782550334155420074.

³⁹ Hern, Alex, och Tom Phillips. ”Elon Musk Faces Brazil Inquiry after Defying X Court Order”. The Guardian, 08 april 2024. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/08/elon-musk-brazil-x-jair-bolsonaro.

⁴⁰ Musk, Elon ”Coming shortly, 𝕏 will publish everything demanded by  @Alexandre  and how those requests violate Brazilian law”. X (formerly Twitter), 07 april 2024, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1776989005848207503.

⁴¹ Musk, Elon ”Should I step down as head of Twitter?” X (formerly Twitter), 19 december 2022, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097?lang=en.

⁴² Elon Musk: Only Blue Tick Users to Vote in Twitter Polls on Policy. 20 december 2022. www.bbc.com, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64034892.

⁴³ Elliott, Vittoria ”Where the Hell Is X CEO Linda Yaccarino?” Wired. www.wired.com, https://www.wired.com/story/linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-x/. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

⁴⁴ Elliott, Vittoria. ”Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino Is Teetering on the Glass Cliff”. Wired. www.wired.com, https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-linda-yaccarino-glass-cliff/. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.

⁴⁵ SEC.gov | Elon Musk Settles SEC Fraud Charges; Tesla Charged With and Resolves Securities Law Charge. 27 maj 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20200527074308/https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226.