A modern Icarus: Elon Musk rockets to the sun, astride his Tweety-bird
My feelings toward both Elon Musk & Twitter were always mixed. But when the former bought the latter, ambivalence turned to revulsion. I fled the Twitterverse a week after Musk got his keys to the palace and proceeded to fire half the staff, including the entire content moderation team. Hate speech blossomed. A month later the Nazis – welcomed by Musk – stormed the gates. Frankly, it was a relief to be gone. Twitter was like an energy-thief-friend, one that always takes more than he gives. Am I grateful to Musk for driving me away? No, the man defines menace – both to his workers and democracy. But not to worry, America. By choosing to cosplay Icarus, Musk became his own worst enemy. In the process he’s destroying Twitter, a dagger at the heart of democracy and journalism everywhere. Perhaps I should explain. My musings from the last year. . .
1. Nazis invade the Confederate Attic
There’s irony in why I left Twitter. Because it was Nazis that got me onto it in the first place. I guess that requires explanation. I had long heard the buzz around Twitter but managed to stay away until the summer of 2017. Then there were these Nazis:
Charlottesville Rally Poster released online (I found it on the Nazi website, Stormfront).
The Nazis in Virginia had gone there to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee, which says it all, both about Nazis and the “Old South” crowd. Birds of a feather and all that. In Trump’s telling Charlottesville was the place with good people on both sides. I’ll let you look at the poster and make your own judgement. Hint: the first nine speakers are either out-and-out Nazis, or Nazi-adjacent. The tenth, Dr. Michael Hill is a southern nationalist from League of the South.
Nazis were not a new thing for me. I had been talking about them for decades to anyone who would listen, trying to warn about the rising and increasingly connected movement of Nazis, Klan and other violent white supremacists. I grew up in 60s Mississippi and understood the danger when no one stands up against them; I’ve closely tracked their progress since the early 1980s. Pre-2000 violent white supremacists were a growing threat but one isolated from the larger society. They were also obsessed with in-fighting, which got in the way of their pipe-dream race-war that would put them on top while redefining America. That dream has been around for ages; the same thing motivated Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh alike. But apart from horrific, randomized violence such as the Sharon Tate murders and Oklahoma City bombing, despite Ruby Ridge and Waco, it wasn’t going anywhere. The internet changed that. It allowed previously isolated individuals to connect online. When Twitter came along it expanded their organizational toolkit.
Picture I took of marching Nazis in Stockholm, 2011. Charlottesville was nothing new. The new thing was a President saying this is okay.
The horror of Charlottesville Nazis, brazenly marching tiki-torch style, alarmed me enough to write a story which I published on the Daily Kos website: After Charlottesville: Seven key Nazis and their links to Putin & Trump. I then joined Twitter to do my bit, be part of the conversation. Even though I was unknown, my story got some play. The algorithm was kinder to newcomers back in the day. Now it prioritizes the already established.
That was how my Twitter story began. It was the Nazis that got me there, then I got hooked. Not because of the Twitter serotonin but because of the community I found. Communities I should say. There were many. In most I was simply a lurker, hanging around the political/news crowd to listen. In some, like what I’m going to call “Mississippi Twitter”, I became a participant. I also discovered “Black Twitter”, which became one of my favorite things on or off Twitter. Then there were the academic communities organized around history, sociology, archeology and science – showing me things I otherwise would have missed. Twitter became the best way to follow the Russian attack on Ukraine as well. After Putin invaded I added a lot of Ukrainian journalists and military specialists to my feed.
That was Twitter’s good side. Over five years I selected a diverse group of wonderful people to follow on my feed. But still, it left me feeling hollow. And then there was Twitter’s dark side.
2. Twitter Lizard Brain
There was a world of pre-Musk bad on Twitter too. It was like talking to a rude stranger who’s going to walk away after your first sentence unless you say something really extraordinary. Or really inflammatory. Most opt for the later since it’s easier to burn down community than build one.
A lot of folks in the Twitterverse get hooked on endless doom-scrolling, looking for that outrage-rush. There’s a reason why they do it. When something triggers us, the brain releases neurotransmitters called catecholamines. They hit the Amygdala – that primitive lizard brain inside each and every one of us – and it’s like a five-alarm fire. A lot of people get high on it and keep coming back for more. Trumpist politicians – but not only them – have built careers pushing catecholamine addiction.
Our lizard brain explains how Twitter – along with other social media – helped create the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, admitted as much to Congress. New York Times reported his testimony:
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said during his congressional testimony on Thursday that the site played a role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, in what appeared to be the first public acknowledgment by a top social media executive of the influence of the platforms on the riot …
“Yes,” he said. “But you also have to take into consideration the broader ecosystem. It’s not just about the technological systems that we use.”
3. A Sickly Smell of Elon enters the room
Twitter had struggled at content moderation for years but January 6 laid bare their failure to stop harmful actors from using the platform. Within two months of the Trump Capitol insurrection, Twitter finally resorted to mass cancellation of accounts that broke community use rules. They slowly began to reign in the excessive hate.
Then Elon entered the arena. He was outraged at the new Twitter controls. Robin Givhan at Wapo said it best:
Musk revels in the freewheeling mayhem that so easily erupts on Twitter. Underlying his vision of Twitter as a digital square is the idea that it should be a place where people can say pretty much whatever they’d like. He equates a public space with breathing freely. But a public space is also a shared one. It isn’t merely a spot where people come together to exchange ideas, it’s also a shared ground where a multitude of different people have to coexist and doing so requires rules and standards and norms. Without them, the public square would essentially be a boxing ring, where strangers pummel each other in frustration and disgust.
I didn’t want to be part of a social media boxing ring. Twitter had too much of that already. I stopped tweeting but waited to see what Elon would do. On the day before Halloween Musk retweeted a scurrilous lie about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, accusing him of responsibility for the hammer attack that nearly killed him. The lie was from a right-wing site known for disinformation. I archived my Tweets (packed my Twitter-bags so to speak) and left.
A month later Musk let Nazi Andrew Anglin back on Twitter. Anglin founded the Daily Stormer website, a place for hard-core Nazis to meet. Hate speech exploded on Twitter and antisemitism then moved off-line into real lives. In March Musk jiggering with his algorithm resulted in hate-speech getting dumped into timelines of users who didn’t ask for it.
I left not a moment too soon.
4. Twitter in the rear-view mirror
What a strange thing it was, Twitter. What a stupid idea really. Micro-blogging at 140 characters, the cut-off abrupt and merciless, no exceptions even for punctation. What to do when you come up 3 characters long? Drop a period, leave out a comma. Loose the apostrophe on the plural. Spell it funny. Twitter was a merciless editor, bent on teaching bad grammar. Then they rolled out 280 characters. Better. But. Learning to write for the thing was an ordeal. I wasted hours, days, months figuring it out. Twitter is a format best suited to snark kings /queens and bullies; Trump’s claim that he was the Hemingway of Twitter was not wrong. Assuming Hemingway was a blustering bully seeking to destroy American democracy.
Me? I’m not Hemmingway. I hail from William Faulkner country – which is a state of mind as well as a place. Faulkner could pour buckets of words onto page after page without coming up for breath or typing a period. Twitter forced me to abandon my inner-Faulkner. I learned to keep it short & sweet, which was a good. But in the end I wanted to do more than throw snark at the wall, so I gravitated to tweet-threads; multiple little tweet-beads strung on twitter-thread like pearls to make a mini-essay. The pressure’s on, because only the zingers in that thread get any traction. Viral-twitter-traction I mean. Analytics told me it’s usually just the first tweet that gets noticed. Unless you had tens of thousands of followers, going viral was extremely rare. I had nearly 500 followers; my very top tweet for 2022 was seen by just 23,000. A Tweet about my home state:
Maybe it's time to talk about Mississippi's "fraternity affirmative action program" that puts marginally competent as well as completely incompetent white fraternity members into important governmental & corporate jobs.
Our Governor, Tate Reeves, was one of those frat affirmative action hires and it shows. If you doubt me, take a look at some of his KA frat buddies at Millsaps College.
Millsaps Annual with Tate Reeves KA Fraternity Brothers
I nailed that Tweet; but how much good did it do? Only 3.75% of the people who saw the Tweet engaged with it. Virtually no one read the rest of the thread where I explained how the frat-business-government pipeline works in Mississippi. There was no discussion outside my Twitter-bubble, so the real-life impact was zilch. But when I saw I had gotten 70 re-tweets there was that hit of serotonin that made me feel pathetically good. Seventy re-tweets was a lot for me but a tiny drop in then Twitter ocean of 500 million tweets a day. That feel-good rush lasted 15 minutes. Max.
When I thought “Is that all there is”, I wasn’t alone. According to Pew research 67% of Twitter users thought that only a few see their content; “21% think nobody sees it”. If you want to feel truly insignificant, you can lay on damp grass and stare at the night sky. All those stars. Stretching back 14 billion years.
Or you can go on Twitter.
Other research shows that 97% of all American Tweets are created by just 25% of American users. Elon Musk gets tens of thousands of re-tweets for every gem he writes. This one from pre-takeover Elon was re-tweeted 94,700 times:
Chocolate milk is insanely good. Just had some.
Soon after that Tweet, Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
5. Elon Musk the genius is not very good at math
There is no one true way to go about building a Substack. This is your playground, experiment with it. If you’re having fun, your readers will too.
(But trust us on the “subscribe” buttoWhat kind of republic organizes its entire news-gathering capacity around a single app dedicated to chaos, lies, and disinformation – along with the occasional newsworthy info about the latest tornado strike or mass shooting? Not a republic aiming for survival, I assure you.
Musk is a nasty troll who got away with his genius shtick for years. The man who solved the climate crisis with electric cars that drive themselves, and houses wrapped in Tesla solar roofs. The man who fixed gridlock with tunnels that get you from Los Angeles to New York in 45 minutes. The man who will rocket our civilization to Mars, landing one million people on the red planet by 2050.
None of these things are even remotely plausible but Musk gets away with saying them because he is a nasty troll when challenged.
Remember when Bill Gates was shorting Tesla stock and Musk bullied him with a picture Tweet implying Gates looked like a pregnant man? It said: “in case u need to lose a boner fast”.
Then there was cave diver Vernon Unsworth, the British hero who rescued a bunch of Thai kids trapped in an underwater cave. Musk tried to horn in on the rescue attempt with a bunch of unworkable ideas, including a custom-built sub. After Unsworth rejected the sub saying it was too long to handle the cave’s narrow passages, Musk smeared him as “pedo guy”. Unsworth sued. Elon won – as usual – because he had better lawyers who managed to sell the jury his “just kidding” line of defense.
Classy guy, Musk.
But even Elon Musk must eventually come down to earth, and the Twitter bird may be his undoing. His antics at the company have exposed him to different kind of journalism than what he is used to, i.e. the pandering fluffery that passes for American business reporting.
For the record, Musk did not invent PayPal – he was forced out of the company before it became PayPal. Musk did not create Tesla – after investing he forced out the real founders in a hostile takeover, one eventually settled with a deal allowing Musk to call himself co-founder of Tesla. Musk does deserve credit for starting SpaceX and knowing how to hire the right people. But a cloud of Musk hangs over his space venture as well. Business Insider reports that SpaceX employees are relieved that Elon is preoccupied with Twitter since keeps him from mucking around with their work. Wonder what its like at SpaceX after his wonder rocket blew up four minutes after leaving the launch pad?
Despite a long record of flawed ideas and broken promises, the word genius has trailed Musk for two decades. Google “musk genius” and you get over 11 million hits.
The biggest argument against the genius of Elon Musk, however, is his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. I did the math. Something Elon didn’t bother with – or is very bad at. In 2021, Twitter had revenue of $5.08 billion, a 37% increase year over year. But adjusted operating income was just $273 because Twitter was expensive to run. I say adjusted because that 2021 profit was actually a loss – a negative $221 million thanks to litigation costs that disappeared when Twitter “adjusted” their profit. In the last decade the company had made money only twice – during 2018 and 2019. Twitter was no cash cow and the Musk purchase was insanely over-priced. As a thought experiment, let’s say Twitter continued to rake in that $273 million year after year. Elon Musk would need 161 years to recoup his investment. But it’s even worse than that. The debt service alone on the Musk-Twitter deal is $1.5 billion a year thanks to $13 billion Musk owes his banks.
Musk thought he could cost-cut his way to profitability; hence the employee blood-bath after his take-over, cutting staff by 80%. The loss of content moderation, public relations and advertising personnel, however, came with a cost: an increase in Nazis and trolls and advertisers heading for the exits. What followed was a massive drop in ad revenue. According to Bloomberg, Twitter’s top ten advertisers cut their spend by 89%.
Musk claims it’s all worth it and the future is rosy:
I feel like we’re headed to a good place. We’re roughly break-even, [and] I think we’re trending toward being cash-flow positive very soon, literally in a matter of months.
Wishful thinking or reality? Who knows. Since Twitter went private under Musk, its financials are a black-box. Musk himself says that Twitter is now worth only $20 billion – meaning he lost more than half his investment in less than a year. According to his own math.
In December The Washington Post identified some $7 billion in Twitter equity investors, including Saudi Arabia & Qatar investors. It’s worth noting that equity partners get access to Twitter user data. Do they get to read everyone’s direct messages? No one knows because as I mentioned, Musk Twitter is a black box.
Not to worry, Musk the genius still dreams. He has folded Twitter in a new Musk company called X.com. He envisions X as an “everything app” that does social media, messaging, banking and god knows what else. Business Insider reported on X based on a text that Musk sent to his brother (one revealed during the brief Musk-Twitter court case):
"I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages/links like Twitter. . . You have to pay a tiny amount to register your message on the chain, which will cut out the vast majority of spam and bots."
Musk said the site would have a "massive real-time database" that would keep permanent copies of messages and followers, and a "Twitter-like app on your phone" that can access the database in the cloud.
Visa can handle thousands of transactions per second. Blockchain such as Bitcoin can do seven transactions per second. As I said, Elon is bad at math.
6. Tesla investors suck at math too
Musk can waste time and money playing in his Twitter sandbox because he’s the world’s richest man – or used to be – thanks to Tesla, a vastly overvalued car company. How overvalued? As I write, Tesla is worth about $510 billion and dropping fast. Yesterday Tesla’s market cap was at $580 billion, an insane valuation, more than Toyota, GM, Ford, Volkswagon, Mercedes, Honda and Stellanis combined. All these companies have a combined value of $563.5 billion. And yet they sold 36.3 million vehicles in 2021 versus Tesla’s 936,000.
The Tesla valuation didn’t make sense in 2021 when Tesla owned the electric car market with more than 80% of EV sales. It makes even less sense now with everyone introducing new electrics and Tesla market share expected to drop below 50% in coming months.
And yet Tesla wealth keeps Musk – and Twitter – afloat. For how long?
A lot of investors fretted that Musk’s Twitter obsession would have Tesla ramifications: they were right. After Twitter accepted the Musk deal; Tesla plunged by 12% -- a $100 billion loss in one day. When Musk symbolized his takeover by carrying that ridiculous kitchen sink into Twitter headquarters, Tesla value crumbled further, losing over $100 a share before stabilizing and clawing back most of the loss.
Tesla Model 3. The front end looks distinctly odd. Maybe even ugly. Certainly nothing that = Tesla, the most valuable car company in the world.
Big picture: Tesla finished 2021 with a net worth of $1.09 trillion. Now it’s worth half that and quickly falling back to earth. Same fate as his Starship rocket.
Want to bet on its value come December? Tesla isn’t an investment. It’s an ego-trip in a gambling hall. Yet Tesla provides the cash for Musk to service his Twitter’s $13 billion debt. It’s the reason Musk gets to play mad king in the world’s “public town square”. Don’t believe me? Do the math.
7. Public Square my ass
Musk says Twitter is not about the money. He’s just looking out for the little guy.
Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?
Elon Musk Tweet, March 26th 2022
Let’s parse it.
Is Twitter like a public town square?
No. A public town square is public. Twitter is a privately owned company. Same as the local shopping mall. The local shopping mall imposes regulations on the speech of its customers because bad behavior is bad for business. Pre-Musk Twitter was starting to do the same thing. After Donald Trump was booted from Twitter, along with his many bots and trolls, business improved. The number of Twitter users increased by 21%.
Even an actual public town square puts limits on speech. Villages and cities alike have laws against disturbing the peace. Political marches require permits, which are denied if police fear a disruption of public order. But Elon Musk chafed under the modest content moderation he found at Twitter. So he bought it.
It’s just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.
Elon Musk TED Talk, April 14, 2022
The bounds of US free speech law include many things not allowed on pre-Musk Twitter. Nazis telling us what they’ll do to Jews if they get another chance (spoiler: same as before). Qanon crazies pushing anti-vax lies. Pornography of all stripes. ISIS propaganda. Pedofiles arguing for man-boy love. And last but not least, Steve Bannon & Donald Trump undermining democracy as they falsely claim election fraud. These are all legal under the U.S. Constitution but were quite rightly limited under the Twitter moderation policies that Musk ditched.
Without content moderation, social media devolves to the lowest common denominator, a churning cesspool of cynicism, lies, hatred and puke. Facebook tested the further boundaries of social media bestiality around the globe by not hiring enough local-language content moderators in many of the counties where it operates; the result has been a world-wide tsunami of unbridled racism, including hate-crime murder, as countless numbers of minority/ethnic groups have been attacked by whoever held the upper hand in that particular place. In Myanmar it became genocide. Social media is a mixed blessing at best, a nightmare at worst.
In his April 2022 TED Talk Elon Musk was high on the ego fumes:
My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization …
Such a genius. The ugly truth of social media is this:
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
Post by blue-beetle, August 26, 2010
9. The press is the product – Twitter sells the access
Let’s start with Donald Trump. Take away Twitter and you can imagine an America without Trump at its center. The country would still have its many problems, bad actors and a dysfunctional authoritarian-adjacent Republican Party. But it wouldn’t have a human lie-manufacturing hurricane battering key institutions.
People acknowledge Twitter’s importance to Trump’s rise, but most fail to understand how he used it to construct a story about himself and America, one that placed him in the middle as America’s appointed saviour. A 2021 academic study by Brian Monahan and R.J. Maratea explains it. The Art of the Spiel: Analyzing Donald Trump’s Tweets As Gonzo Storytelling. Cleveland.com unpacked their findings in an interview with Monahan that explains how Trump’s Tweets built six separate frames that came together to create the plot for the story, a story much more powerful than any individual Tweet. A story that gave Trump power:
Our analysis of thousands of Trump’s tweets indicates that much of Trump’s communications are in service of a story he is crafting that is primarily about himself, and it is littered with grievances (many of which share broad themes with the grievances of his supporters), self-praise, and an unrelenting litany of constructed threats and dangers,” Monahan and Maratea wrote in the study. “With this, we suggest that the prominence of his adherents’ ‘deep stories’ in his self-serving mediated storytelling serves as fodder for the larger spiel that he is unfurling, one that depicts a world needlessly imperiled by all sorts of nefarious others whose ill intent, incompetence, and intractable weaknesses can no longer go unchallenged. In this constructed world, Trump is self-appointed as a savior figure, the only one with the temerity to call attention to all that is wrong as well as the fortitude, intellect, and skill to put things right.
In Trump’s storytelling approach, he is not telling his story, but that of his supporters. This despite having little in common with them as a wealthy New York real estate developer and television personality.
Boiled down, Trump’s story was simple, so simple, so classic that it fit on a hat. MAGA. Make America Great Again. Many of his biggest fans took it further, interpreting it as “make my life great again”. That’s the snake oil Trump sold – using Twitter – to almost half the country. That other great Twitter salesman, Elon Musk, did something remarkably similar, selling his narrative of Elon Musk the uber-genius, and mankind as the beneficiary of his greatness. He would save the planet with electric cars and trips to Mars.
Journalism is the Twitter secret sauce that helped Trump and Musk sell their story. Most of the country pays little attention to Twitter itself, they aren’t even on it. According to Pew Research (2022) only 23% of Americans use Twitter – as opposed to the 81% using Youtube. But how often do you read a story about what’s happening on Youtube?
Twitter generates stories because Twitter is populated with journalists and news organizations, and they spread the most sensational things found on Twitter. Musk and Trump both qualified. In 2015 at the start of Trump’s political rise, 24.6% of verified users on Twitter were journalists. They made up the largest single profession on the site, more than sports people or entertainers & actors. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey even credited journalists with Twitter’s rise.
So many around the world have helped make Twitter what it is, but there's one group I'd like to thank today: journalists.
— jack (@jack) March 21, 2015
Journalism gives Twitter its reach. A Pew study says 69% of journalists use Twitter as their go-to social media website for reporting. Editor & Publisher spells out the problem:
In a 2021 study of more than 23,000 articles, two media experts — Logan Molyneux, an assistant professor in journalism at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, and Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media — concluded that comments on Twitter are routinely taken at face value by journalists and placed into stories with no further context.
“This sends repeated messages to audiences that information on Twitter is legitimate and authoritative, granting Twitter power,” Molyneux and McGregor wrote in NiemanLab.
Journalists routinely embed Tweets into stories – instead of reporting the old-fashioned way, by talking to people or attending public meetings. Considerable academic research confirms that Twitter drives news – not the other way around. Such as this study: The Impact of 280 Characters: An Analysis of Trump’s Tweets and Television News Through the Lens of Agenda Building showing how Trump used Twitter to set the nation’s agenda:
Trump, as the 45th U.S. president, impacted the media agenda and the public agenda, especially through Twitter (Perez-Curiel & Naharro, 2019). A Pew Research Center study showed that 16% of 2017 news stories about Trump or his administration included one of his tweets (Mitchell et al., 2017). From an agenda building perspective, by choosing to cover his tweets instead of other news, media placed Trump and his 280-character Twitter addresses at the center of the public agenda (Conway et al., 2015).
Another thing Trump and Musk have in common is how they use a Tweet to turn their army of fan-boys into trolls. Journalist Edward Niedermeyer writing in Slate described his own experience after revealing that Tesla used non-disclosure agreements with customers to keep them from complaining about Tesla’s crummy repair record. He was quickly mobbed by the Musk troll-swarm:
Here was the turducken of Tesla’s information control strategy: NDAs for customers, smears against critical reporters, a vicious pack of online enforcers, and a total disregard for facts holding it all together. It didn’t matter how much evidence I had and how little Musk had, there was always a large and growing “community” willing to assert that I had to be wrong, biased, and outright evil to contradict their hero.
As the years wore on, this pattern repeated itself again and again: Factual reporting drew attacks rather than refutation, Musk’s unofficial social media enforcers evolved from a mob to an ecosystem of influencers and media outlets, and the stock always kept climbing. Clear evidence of Musk’s overpromising, and stories that would have earned any other automaker a congressional hearing, all became lost in the shadow of his ever-growing legend. Countless stories never even saw the light of day for lack of corroboration, including some of the most eye-opening anecdotes I heard in more than 100 interviews with former employees, as Musk’s reputation for aggression cowed many potential sources into silence.
Musk has now stripped verification from journalists, news organizations and public figures,, switching to a paid “verification” system. Meaning anyone can pay eight bucks a month and pretend to be someone else on Twitter. Fake account immediately popped up pretending to be Hillary Clinton, J.K. Rowling and even Pope Francis. Governments around the world are impacted as spoofers and malicious actors alike spread chaos. Here’s just one report, from the Guardian:
Fake accounts claiming to represent the Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation all began sharing messages early Friday falsely claiming that the city’s Lake Shore Drive – a major thoroughfare – would close to private traffic starting next month.
Official accounts for New York State have been affected as well. Spend some time on Google and you quickly see Twitter Blue with its real-looking fake accounts is a world-wide concern.
Yet the journalists stay. NBC reported on the debacle while relying entirely on Tweets. Tweets that may or may not be who they say they are. Not a single live interview or follow-up with the Tweeter. No confirmed information, which is the whole point of relying on established media outfits for news. They might as well be telling us what people are saying on Parlor, Gab, 4-chan or Trump’s own Truth Social. Or Mastodon or Notes or Facebook for that matter.
Why are journalists so addicted to Twitter? Jonathan Last, writing for The Bullwark succinctly explains the why:
Twitter killed the blog and lowered the barrier to entry for new writers from “Must have a laptop, the ability to navigate WordPress, and the capacity to write paragraphs” to “Do you have an iPhone and the ability to string 20 words together? With or without punctuation?”
If you were able to build a big enough audience on Twitter, then media institutions fell all over themselves trying to hire you—because they believed that you would then bring your audience to them.
Established writers flocked to Twitter because, as Walter Bagehot observed, once financial leverage exists for anyone, everyone must use it just to stay at par. If you were a writer for the Washington Post, or Wired, or the Saginaw Express, you had to build your own audience not to advance, but to avoid being replaced.
For journalists, audience wasn’t just status—it was professional capital. In fact, it was the most valuable professional capital.
Professional capital or not, Twitter should never have become the go-to news source for American media. It cheapens reporting, allows political actors to set agendas and leads to superficial analysis based on the latest Twitter hot-take. Journalists should know better.
Bottom line, Twitter is a business. And we, the users, were its product. That includes the journalists and media organizations populating Twitter. They thought they were acting in their own business interests, when in fact they weren’t. They were working for Twitter. We all suffered. If it wasn’t for the constant reporting of his Twitter sensationalism, Trump could never have built the story that crafted his political narrative. Musk could never have convinced his army of rubes that he was genius material.
Even after the Musk Starship rocket blew up minutes after leaving the launch pad, an army of journalists are repeating the SpaceX official Twitter line – the launch was a huge success. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. I’d still like to see real reporting about it, as opposed to the endless Twitter stenography that now passes for American journalism. The Washington Post ran this after the Starship explosion: Why SpaceX’s Starship explosion is a low-key success. The story was based on just one real-life interview, that with a curator at the Smithsonian Air & Space museum. Not someone with any real insight into the actual SpaceX launch. The rest of the article was based on four Tweets touting the success of the failed launch. Two were from SpaceX and Musk. Another from the NASA administrator who financed the launch. And one came from a French astronaut making the cryptic statement: “Never mistake trial for failure.”
Twitter is the crack cocaine of American journalism. What’s the rehab?
Cancel the damn account, that’s the rehab.
Photo by Gary Bridgman, creative commons copyright 2003. Montage with Twitter Bird in mirror by Kent Moorhead, creative commons copyright 2023.
The Twitter “public square” was never a public square, and it wasn’t good for America or the world. It sure as hell was bad for journalism. The sooner Musk burns it to the ground the better. I’m not opposed to social media. I use Facebook some. I have a Mastodon account that I’m still wrapping my head around. And I’m on substack Notes. But I use them sparingly, for specific things; I’m no longer looking for a replacement.
Twitter in the rear-view mirror is a beautiful thing.
Personally, I don't think Elon even deserves credit for SpaceX. We don't need SpaceX. Spaceflight is not a for-profit business. Only NASA, the ESA, and other governmental spaceflight agencies should be in charge, and they should stop getting hammered with budget cuts, or rather, NASA should be. It should be properly funded, which it hasn't been since the '70s.