Could Elon Musk’s era spell the end of social media billionaires?
Twitter has been taken over by its least interesting troll for $44bn. When Elon Musk took a stake in the platform, he claimed it was to ensure the “future of civilisation” and preserve a “common digital town square”. Roughly translated, that means the world’s richest man has bought his favourite megaphone.
Musk, with 112.1 million followers, is an obsessive Twitter tryhard: the attention economy’s biggest attentionseeker. From baselessly calling a British diver a “pedo”, to his baffling stunt at Twitter HQ – turning up with a kitchen sink and uttering the punchline, “let that sink in” – he clearly thinks comedy is his metier. He reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’ barb about an enemy: he “thinks he’s a wit and is half right”.
Musk says that buying Twitter is “not a way to make money”. That’s certainly true. The company struggled for years to make a profit. It makes 90% of its current revenues from advertising to just 217 million “monetisable” users (and illegally using their private data to target ads at them). But this is just a fraction of monthly active users on sites like Facebook (2.8 billion), TikTok (1.2 billion), YouTube (2 billion) and Instagram (1.4 billion).
However, Twitter has been great publicity: not just for Musk’s zeppelinsized ego, but also for his businesses. Tesla spends next to nothing on advertising, but Musk’s actions generate acres of free coverage.
Like Donald Trump, Musk has a grasp of the potential of Twitter. Its salience has never been due to business success, still less to technology. As editor Nilay Patel points out in an article on The Verge, its success is political. Twitter attracts a disproportionate share of addicted opinion-formers like journalists, politicians, writers and celebrities, the sort of people Musk wants thinking about him.
Yet, in buying his platform, Musk has also bought$13bn of debt. Twitter was previously repaying over $50m a year to its creditors. It will now, according to some analyses, have to find more than $1bn a year to merely pay back the interest. Even if Musk isn’t out to make a profit, he can’t ignore such losses. Stemming the haemorrhage will now be a top priority for him, either by charging users a subscription fee for verified accounts or, more likely since charges might drive away users, cuts.
The notoriously capricious boss had already indicated that before backtracking, he would sack 75% of the workforce to help balance Twitter’s books. But now, having already sacked four of Twitter’s top executives – he allegedly claims to have done so “for cause”, apparently in a bid to avoid tens of millions of dollars in compensation – he is also looking for job cuts across Twitter.
Among the easy cuts for Musk would be staff who enforce measures to restrict disinformation, spamming and abuse. Only illegal speech should be restricted, he says. This position – allegedly that of a “free speech absolutist” – would mean that Twitter, already a frequent alibi of repressive governments, would march in step with those regimes. More free speech for trolls and racists, less free speech for dissidents. But it’s a throwback to the years during which Twitter claimed that the best response to “bad speech” was more speech (meaning, more content to monetise).
For all the talk of a “common digital town square”, Twitter has always thrived on angry disputation driven by news and entertainment. This puts the company in a bind. On the one hand, the relentless nastiness is what makes the system so compulsive: the gutpunch of an insulting, racist or stupid tweet in your feed incites the cathartic banging out of quick, angry replies. Likewise, it has thrived on the emotional contagions that drive the viral spread of far-right disinformation, from Islamic State to QAnon. Without them, Twitter would be more boring than it is. And the advertisers would have a less captive audience.
On the other hand, it has repeatedly lost high-profile users over trolling and disinformation. It has been forced, over the years, to ramp up its moderation efforts and ban high-profile users like Trump who, in 2017, was estimated to bring in $2bn a year for Twitter. Despite such gestures, it has been losing its most active and profitable users, who are losing interest – no doubt in part due to sheer exhaustion – in Twitter beefs over politics and celebrities.
Musk may think he can relight the old fires, but Twitter is not alone in struggling. Facebook user growth in Europe and North America flatlined years ago. Instagram growth is slowing. Average time spent on platforms, after
soaring in 2020 due to Covid-19 lockdowns, is likely to slide. All social media platforms, indeed most tech firms, are facing tough times as advertisers slash budgets. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has been searching for the next profit model for years: witness his failed cryptocurrency enterprise and his struggling “metaverse” project causing the parent company, Meta, to plummet in stock markets.
The social industry may be approaching a moment of crisis wherein growth, revenue and long-brewing problems of political legitimacy coalesce in favour of a rupture. The industry has already fragmented on the right, as far-right users alienated by the moderation policies of industry giants form their own social media ecologies. But many others have long hankered for an alternative to the exploitative, manipulative and addictive systems designed for the enrichment of billionaires like Zuckerberg, Musk and TikTok boss Zhang Yiming.
The difficulty has not been the absence of open-source alternatives, like Mastodon. Indeed, some Twitter users responded to Musk’s takeover by trying to trigger an exodus to Mastodon. The problem is the “network effect”. The old platforms offer users advantages precisely because of the number of users they have. To make a dent in that would require a migration numbering in more than just thousands.
But we should keep our eyes open. It is just possible that – Musk being Musk – he will do something stupid and offensive enough to catalyse the crisis that at last loosens the grip of the billionaire monopolists.