San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Musk just the owner Twitter deserves
Within 12 hours of Elon Musk finalizing his $44 billion takeover of Twitter and tweeting “the bird is freed” on Oct. 27, the platform was bombarded by racist posts. According to the nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute, which monitors social media threats, use of the slur “n—” increased by around 500%.
Many doomsayers saw this as conclusive evidence that the platform will collapse under Musk’s leadership. For me, a Black Twitter user, it was like any other Friday.
Twitter fans shouldn’t worry that Musk will run the company into the ground. The real worst-case scenario is Musk increasing Twitter’s profits. Competing social networking sites might be influenced by his decisions — none of which appear to prioritize making social media a less nasty or
more truthful environment.
“The fear that certain communities on Twitter will be further marginalized under Musk is real,” said Yumi Wilson, a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism professor and expert on social media platforms. “But Twitter was a scary place even before Elon.”
So far it’s been hard to call Musk’s early tenure as Twitter CEO a success. There have been advertising mutinies, high-level departures and a desperate stink around Musk’s early decision-making. But that’s not to say that he hasn’t been influential.
For example, last week, Musk cut the company’s workforce by half. He responded to the uproar with a tweet explaining the layoffs were necessary since the company was losing more than $4 million per day.
A week later, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced layoffs of more than 11,000 people, or 13% of its staff, in a similar effort to cut costs.
“It’s interesting to wonder why (Meta founder) Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement came soon after Twitter’s,” Wilson said. “Especially since so many tech companies said not much is going to change after the pandemic, and now we’re starting to see some change.”
On Tuesday, Musk conducted a rocky rollout out of his $8 monthly Twitter Blue membership service, which gives paying users preferential treatment in all aspects of the Twitter experience, including fewer advertisements, faster access to replies, mentions and searches, and the opportunity to upload longer videos. The service also allows subscribers to have a blue verification badge, which previously was only provided to users through Twitter’s somewhat secretive verification process.
All the while, Musk has been clear that he wants to make Twitter safe again for blowhards and haters — unless they’re being salty about him.
The self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who tweeted and then deleted a completely bogus conspiracy theory about the Oct. 28 attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, announced a Nov. 6 crackdown on parody accounts only after comedian Kathy Griffin impersonated him using her own account.
The wealthiest man in the world certainly isn’t the most self-aware man in the world, but he is pretty thin-skinned and seems to crave an online environment where only he is immune to criticism, bigotry and accountability.
As social media goes, Twitter isn’t a unique conduit of hate speech.
Studies between 2018 and 2021 by organizations like Amnesty International and the Brookings Institution have shown that hate speech thrives on social media platforms, and women of color often suffer the brunt of it along with other marginalized groups. Twitter’s own transparency report from two years ago revealed the number of accounts suspended or deleted for breaking Twitter’s abusive behavior policy increased by 77% between July and December 2019 compared to the same period in 2020.
So we shouldn’t be surprised when Montclair State University researchers found 4,778 instances of hate speech in tweets in the 12 hours after Musk concluded his Twitter transaction, or approximately 398 hostile posts each hour.
Despite the backlash, Steven Blank, a tech industry expert and adjunct professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, says not to count out Musk.
“People have made a lot of money off Musk’s insights,” Blank told me. “Even though he might not know what he’s doing today (with Twitter), his instincts for figuring something like this out comes with a pretty impeccable track record. … This isn’t an execution plan. It’s a reinvention, and he’s great at that.”
Musk did this with Tesla, the electric car company that he invested in heavily in the early 2000s, then paid his way up the corporate ladder to become its CEO in 2008, before winning a court decision in 2009 allowing him to be recognized as Tesla’s “founder.”
On Nov. 8, Musk tweeted: “Twitter is the worst! But also the best.”
The historically toxic platform couldn’t have a more fitting owner.