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The Twist

  • Skribentens bild: Karl Johansson
    Karl Johansson
  • 29 dec. 2025
  • 14 min läsning

This is part five 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:



The Twist



As observant readers have already guessed, the twist is that Elon Musk is far from the only social media baron with wide ranging power over their corner of the digital public square. He is just the most erratic, and the most high profile. Indeed, the problem of centralised power over ostensible forums for public debate is not just common, it is endemic to the industry. Most CEOs and majority owners simply prefer not making a big deal of that fact. For example, Meta Platforms Inc, Mark Zuckerberg’s company which owns and runs Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, and Instagram has a two class share structure1 where the class B shares give ten times the voting power of the normal class A shares. Zuckerberg owns2 13.6% of the total amount of class B shares in Meta giving him significant power over the company. It is difficult to compare the level of ownership between Zuckerberg and Musk, but it is safe to say that both have significant power over their respective social media companies, even if Zuckerberg lacks the complete power Musk has. And this is not just a feature of Twitter and Meta, again the entire industry is structured in this way. Donald Trump owns3 enough shares to have 59.9% of the voting power in his Twitter challenger Truth Social, Steve Huffman owns4 about half the shares of Reddit, and Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy control5 99% of the votes of Snap Inc which owns and develops SnapChat. The list goes on.


To be clear, it is not unusual that companies have strong a concentration of voting power in one person or a group of people, especially not in companies which were founded relatively recently. At the same time though, few companies have the cultural and political power that social media companies have. Furthermore, a company where power is centralised in a single individual is not much of a problem in a highly competitive market where consumers have the option of easily switching to a competitor. But as we have discussed, social media is not like any other business, and due to the powerful network effects inherent in the business model competition has not been particularly fierce. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is instructive here; whatever you think of the man and the way he has run X it is not particularly controversial to say that he has plenty of detractors, many of which have openly and loudly stated their intention to leave X. Many if not most are still on the site. If they could simply switch to Threads the way you would exchange one laundry detergent for another they probably would have done so already, the fact that so many are complaining about Musk’s Twitter on X shows how impractical it is to switch.


Briefly accept as a premise the three main arguments previous chapters have tried to put forward, those being:


1: That social media matters, it can and does have a real effect on culture and politics,


2: That social media as an industry face uncommonly strong network effects, which in most cases lead to a very high concentration of users on a single platform per format,


3: That giving a single individual wide ranging power over the de facto public forum betrays fundamental democratic values by investing in a single person far too much power over speech.


Does it not follow that we have a duty to rein in the power of social media moguls? Should we accept the status quo as inevitable?


It is the constant and continuing perception from regulators and parliaments that social media is a business first and a cultural institution second or third which has allowed Musk to run roughshod over the previously established safety rules. By any other industry’s standards X is listing, surrounded by sharks. It makes less revenue, employs fewer staff, has worse relationships with regulators, employees, customers, and users all while it has half a dozen competitors to tangle with. And it is still the most popular microblog with a margin. That is not how you would expect a business to fare with so many headwinds. But social media is not like other businesses, cannot be regulated like other businesses, and cannot be expected to fix itself.


One of the strengths of liberal capitalism as a system is that it is able to defang a business’ political bent, if a company becomes too political customers will likely go elsewhere. But as discussed in the last chapter network effects are too strong for people to be able to be effective in voting with their feet. The fact that these sorts of situations where a business leader becomes tyrannical are rare means that democratic capitalist societies have not had to build systems and rules for dealing with such cases. If the open market usually solves the issue by itself why waste time and effort of inventing a different remedy? Open societies do have rules and procedures for dealing with monopolies, but can Twitter be called a monopoly? Unlike a more typical anti-trust case like Standard Oil it has several credible competitors, each with their own unique blend of moderation styles and feature sets. At the same time it is clear that Twitter is not wholly unlike a monopoly either. The fact that people are spoiled for choice of microblog does not change the fact that most people choose to stay on Twitter. The monopoly analogy is flawed, Twitter by definition cannot be a monopoly if it has viable competitors. It is also an imperfect lens for finding solutions to Twitter’s dominance. Standard Oil’s monopoly was broken by literally breaking up the company into several smaller companies, but that would not solve the issue of Twitter, only give another platform the status as king of the microblogs.


A better analogy is probably of a social media platform as infrastructure for the public forum. And like most physical infrastructure – such as railroads and dams – the infrastructure which underpins the digital town square is inherently political. The core governance issues which previous chapters have discussed are unusual and not often encountered in the realm of business, but are routine and well understood in the realm of politics. Continuing to treat Musk, Zuckerberg, and their peers as business people first and as their power over speech, and thus impact on culture and politics, as incidental will result in inadequate and reactive regulation. Being proactive and taking a broad perspective is the key to a more pro-social digital media landscape.


As much as this series has been critical of Elon Musk and his colleagues’ management of Twitter it is as mentioned important to consider that things could have been worse. A botched overhaul of the verification system and digital lesè-majesté is an inconvenience compared with an algorithm-based recommendation system intended to spread misinformation or hate. Anyone can come up with a whole host of nightmare scenarios stemming from a truly bad faith actor owning a major social media; indeed as mentioned in The Dilemma there are allegations that TikTok actively tries to push a social and a political agenda while also spying on users. One could imagine the possible conflicts of interests that arise from having a social media baron take a public stance on electoral politics. Or what if a major politician owned a social media platform? Could you trust that they gave their political rivals a fair shot at making their voices heard? Again, the observant reader will have already seen the twist coming: Elon Musk has officially endorsed Donal Trump for American president in the 2024 election, and Trump himself owns and controls Truth Social. Far from dystopian fiction, the idea that an individual politician can privately own a social media platform is already reality. That is not to say that we should be overly alarmist about private ownership, traditional media have been privately owned and run for centuries. But to continue the monarchy analogy, the reason why it is a poor form of governance is that it is wide open for abuse. For every benevolent dictator there is a mad despot, and the fact that the current Technoking is not as bad as they theoretically could be is not an argument against decentralising power from a single individual. The political influence a social media baron can wield is definitely big enough to be a concern for free societies.


What can we do then? Diagnosing a problem can be most of the battle in a medical context, but in the social sciences finding the problem is the easy part. This series’ diagnosis is that current corporatised governance systems are insufficient and inadequate for controlling social media, but so far the discussion has centred on causes and effects rather than alternatives. The reason is simple; there is no obvious solution. During our discussion this series has tried to be clear in making the distinction between outcome and system. It has argued that Musk buying the title of Technoking of X is a bad outcome caused by a bad system, but fixing the system is not as simple as preventing mergers and acquisitions in the social media industry. Nor can nationalising X solve the issue, that just hands the power from an individual to the state. The ideal system then borrows from political institutions the ideas of term limits and checks and balances, while borrowing from corporations the ideas of independent board members and regular public disclosures.


Perhaps a good analogy for what an ideal social media governance structure should resemble is a central bank. Money working as it should is important to a modern society and, just as with social media, many a despot have misused the power of coinage and interest rates for their own ends to anti-social outcomes. Most central banks are a part of government but independent to choose their own policies, and have to not just disclose what policies they implement but present their reasons for why they did as they did. They release data and research, and work for the benefit of society rather than the interests of politicians or business leaders. They aim for a low but steady rate of inflation to establish a stable and level playing field for economic activity. The analogy is not perfect, for one most central banks do not operate across more than one country, but they are examples of organisations which manage commons with a lot of potential power while being removed from parliamentary politics.


Ideally though, social media should be less tied to the state than central banks are. When dealing with power over the news and political narratives it is safest not to give the state too much power. One suggestion would be to make institute a three way coalition between civil servants, civil society groups, and the platforms employees to run the board of directors. That way the state and civil society can unite against anti-social but profit generating ideas, civil society and the business can unite against a censorious state. Finally the state and the business can unite against impractical or unworkable suggestions from an overzealous civil society.


The issue with a public-private partnership model for social media governance is two-fold: firstly the moguls are unlikely to simply accept handing over control and power to the state and civil society, and secondly there is the question of which state gets to have partial control over the platform. The global town square model of social media arose for commercial reasons, if your revenue comes from advertising then it is in your best interest to get as many users on your platform as possible irrespective of where. But if your goal is to preserve and foster a pro-social digital forum in line with your values then there must be an agreed upon value set to use as a standard. Even though all Western democracies value the freedom of speech the conception of that freedom varies between Europe, America, and Oceania, as the case of Musk’s spat with Australia brought up in The Bird and the Technoking illustrates.


The first issue can be solved by compensating the social media moguls for the ownership share they have to surrender to the state. It will likely be contentious, but it is doable and the remedy is clear. The second issue raises the question of how to weigh value of the transnational scope of contemporary social media platforms against the value of letting each society decide if and how online speech should be regulated. The fact is that modern social media developed the way it did in the absence of clear rules, and that makes the resulting platforms path dependent on the lax regulation of twenty years ago. The current model of social media is not inevitable. The easiest option would be to continue along the current path, but due to the speed at which platforms developed there was never enough of public debate over what social media should be like for there to have formed strong philosophical or ideological models for what social media should be. Currently, it is transnational, centralised into a few powerful platforms, and largely unaccountable to its users. That is one model, but it could just as well be organised nationally or by language, or feature an elected post as head of say Facebook. Just because it works this way now does not mean that it has to be this way.


The end of the age of absolutist monarchy in Europe did not produce a single dominant new system for governance. Some states became constitutional monarchies, and other republics. If we agree that we should depose the Technoking we still have to solve the issue of what the central function of a social media should be. The optimal governance structure is different if we think the most important function of social media is preventing the spread of disinformation compared to if the key function is to communicate new ideas. If society takes up the challenge of proactively designing a new model for social media governance it is important to remember to question basic aspects like if an ad-supported business model or if default pseudonymity are desirable. It is worth noting that the different functions social media platforms serve are often in direct opposition to each other. For example, if the highest priority is combatting viral spread of misinformation then pseudonymity and recommendation algorithms are bad features, but if the highest priority is to spread new ideas then those same features might be highly beneficial.


It is impossible to create a system which fulfils everyone’s wishes, and it is entirely possible that the final result will look a lot like the current system. That is fine, the important part is to make sure that the system was chosen by the society for which it is supposed to act as the digital public square. As the central social and cultural hub in the digital realm it is vital to have a public mandate, and that can only be achieved when at least some of the control over load bearing platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are wrested away from unaccountable tech moguls. The exact shape of the final result is something for later thinkers to clear up, this series mainly hopes to stress the case that change is possible and necessary.


The political case for reforming social media is clear, but so is the case for end users. Social media is, like TikTok in the memorable words of Jonathan Haidt6 “the worst consumer product in the history of humanity” in the sense that many users actively want to spend less time on social media but feel a social pressure to stay because everyone else stays. A profit motive is not inherently bad or necessarily morally corrupting, but the way in which algorithmic social media chases advertising revenue has become a real problem. As discussed in The Dilemma, the slot machine-esque mechanics of delivering the next short form video and the way in which platforms directly benefit financially from cultivating the stardom of controversial and extremist figures like Andrew Tate is harmful to society at large and individual users, not to mention the way social media has wrecked the body images of a generation of young women and girls.


Current algorithmic social media is for the individual user a bad proposition no matter the use case. If you use social media to follow the news you would stand a better chance of getting less partisan and more fact based reporting by going to a newspaper or news broadcast instead. If you use social media to socialise you would get a more fulfilling and deeper connection by meeting people in person or over the phone. And if you use social media to entertain yourself you would get a more lasting sense of fun by watching a movie, listening to music, or playing a video game instead. The list goes on. The need to optimise social media for duration instead of satisfaction inevitably makes social media an inefficient and user hostile experience. If you found what you were looking for you would be free to leave, and if you left you would stop seeing advertisements.


As discussed, network effects are uncommonly strong in social media which means that there is not much of an incentive for the big platforms to focus on the user experience once they have reached the status of dominant for their specific medium. By reshaping governance structures to have a wider focus than simply profit generation, there is room for user focused design again. By reforming social media governance to be more pro-social than pro billionaire owner there is a good chance that the user experience improves too. If the highest priority is not to keep users scrolling as long as possible, if the platform is optimised for enjoyment instead of for duration would it not stand to reason that it would be a better source of news, socialisation, and entertainment? Would social media not be a more interesting place if it sought to foster genuine exchanges of ideas rather than profiting hate and controversy for controversy’s sake?


Societies have functioned for thousands of years without Twitter, so it is not the end of the world if Musk runs it into the ground. What is most troubling about his ownership of Twitter is how it betrays our democratic ideals. Access to political power should be earned through the contest of ideas, not bought with borrowed money. Regular people and journalists should be able to criticise those in power, irrespective of if they are political or business leaders. People should have the right to express their views without fear of reprisals so long as those views do not espouse hate or advocate for violence. The power to regulate speech should be limited to those who have been given a democratic mandate to oversee it, and it should be exercised without fear or favour.  


The core argument this series has tried to put forward is this: social media is too important to be left to the whims of Technokings and Silicon Valley types with a focus on the technology itself rather than its effects on society. If we accept that social media is the place where culture, politics, and socialising happens in the 21st century then we need to let society have a say in how social media is run. Elon Musk is not the first, and will not be the last erratic individual with vast power over a significant institution which happens to be a company. But he is a useful example of why social media should not be left to people like him, those with more money than sense.


Social media matters in the sense that it can and does have a real effect on culture and politics, it faces uncommonly strong network effects which in most cases lead to a very high concentration of users on a single platform per format, and that giving a single individual wide ranging power over the de facto public forum betrays fundamental democratic values by investing in a single person far too much power over speech. Social media has myriad problems ranging from the difficulties of moderation to the effects it has had on young people’s body images. The solution to these problems is not as simple as to institute new governance structures for the companies running these platforms. But it is a first step, and it is a way to try to ensure that change is systemic rather than piece meal. But it is not inevitable or unfixable. Durable, lasting change requires breaking the dominance of the aforementioned half a dozen people who control X, Facebook, Truth Social, Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Until then free speech on the internet is less a right than a privilege granted by the Technokings.




Sources:


The Twist

2 SCHEDULE 13G, Mark Zuckerberg. Meta Platforms Inc, 14 februari 2024, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1548760/000119312524036200/d739494dsc13ga.htm.

3 FORM 10-Q. Trump Media & Technology Group Corp, 09 augusti 2024, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000114036124036633/ef20030085_10q.htm.

6The Economic Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood, with Jonathan Haidt, Capitalisn’t podcast, 18 July 2024,https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/the-economic-costs-of-a-phone-based-childhood-with-jonathan-haidt

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