After months of speculation, Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared last week that he was running to be president of the United States on something called Twitter Spaces, a glitchy audio service that one New York Times reporter compared to “a glorified conference call.”
This was definitely not politics as usual. A campaign launch is typically the one chance a candidate has to make a first impression, with red-white-and-blue bunting hanging just so and a telegenic crowd carefully assembled. Twitter of late is a far cry from all that, a chaotic mess, with angry comments drowning out reasonable discussion and persistent questions about the platform’s reliability because of the deep cuts made to its technical staff. Yet there Mr. DeSantis was Wednesday night, enduring 20 minutes of crashes and glitches before he could announce his plans.
It was a digital train wreck, but still, a golden opportunity for Mr. DeSantis. Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk was there in support of Mr. DeSantis, murmuring agreement with his policy proposals. The few questions that were taken came from DeSantis supporters in the audience.
This version of Twitter, designed and driven by Mr. Musk, represents a radical change in our political culture. Yes, we have had powerful, far-reaching social networks for more than a decade now. In 2019, people marvelled that Facebook had surpassed 2.3 billion users and thus officially had more “followers” than Christianity. And, likewise, there have long been powerful media moguls who use their properties to pursue a political agenda – only weeks ago, because of a lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Machines, we learned that Fox News’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, instructed the head of Fox News to help the Republicans running for the Senate from Georgia “any way we can.”
But, up until now, the big social networks have been exceptionally cautious about playing politics. After all, they were auditioning to become a privately owned version of the public square – the least they could do was promise that they not play favourites.
More than that, the big tech platforms were confronting the fear that they had a power that even the biggest, baddest press baron couldn’t approach. You don’t pick up Facebook, YouTube or Twitter like a daily newspaper, it comes right into your phone. And you don’t finish reading Facebook, YouTube or Twitter either, you can keep scrolling forever. These digital platforms have another advantage: they are in the persuasion business, that’s how they make their profits. They study you, show you ads they think you’ll like, and study how you respond to those ads. They are well-trained manipulators.
Messing with politics almost seems too easy for these platforms. One study found that a campaign on Facebook on Election Day designed to increase voter interest boosted turnout by hundreds of thousands of voters. This led one law professor to speculate that if Facebook deployed this promotion with an intention – say, to encourage turnout among users with right-wing tendencies and not those on the left – it could flip a national election. Without scrupulous neutrality, our democracy would be in danger.
Mr. Musk, however, sees himself on a different mission and it is not about neutrality. Sometimes he speaks of the need to defeat “the woke mind virus.” Other times he speaks about defending “free speech.”
Each of these causes have a unique Musk interpretation and unlike even Jeff Bezos at Amazon or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Mr. Musk’s interpretation becomes Twitter’s. He has decided to give priority to the comments from users with a blue checkmark, which they’ve purchased for US$8 a month. Literally having a price on speech doesn’t undercut his definition of free speech. He has agreed to the Turkish government’s demands that Twitter block the accounts of certain critics during its presidential campaign as a condition of remaining in Turkey. This too meets his meaning of free speech. And, as any user can attest, the algorithm seems designed to surface Mr. Musk’s own tweets even to those who aren’t interested.
Now consider the threat of the “woke mind virus,” something that Mr. Musk says could end civilization. Why wouldn’t he tweak the Twitter algorithm to protect us all? If a DeSantis victory is all that separates us from civilization’s collapse, who would sit by and watch?
That the DeSantis announcement was so botched makes the idea of Mr. Musk as political kingmaker seem absurd. But Mr. Musk’s control of Twitter, with nearly 100 million users in the United States, still represents unchartered waters for democracy.
While everyone was laughing, Mr. Musk showed a brave face on Twitter. Replying to media outlets who called the DeSantis event “awkward” or a “meltdown,” he wrote: “I call it ‘massive attention’ Top story on Earth today.”