This is important because of what that place is. Twitter is the domain of news media, a place where journalists share work and interact much more than other platforms. And that means it gets more media attention than other platforms and is used for news consumption disproportionately compared to its competitors. This boils down to a broad sense that Twitter is an organ of America’s elites, a slur applied to overlap with left-wing political views.
So when Musk bought the company, it wasn’t just some rich guy buying a platform. It was a guy whose interest in the platform was explicitly intertwined with his skeptical left-wing politics who suddenly gained control of what his fans see as a left-wing newsroom.
This wasn’t Steve Ballmer buying the Los Angeles Clippers; it’s Donald Trump buying the New York Times.
Let’s first establish that Twitter occupies a unique space in America’s social media universe. In addition to measuring how often people use each platform, Pew conducted research in late 2020 assessing where people got their campaign and political news. While only 23 percent of adults use Twitter, 14 percent of respondents said they used it for campaign news. This is a much narrower gap than other platforms; while more people said they use Facebook for news (25 percent), more than two-thirds of adults use Facebook.
Twitter is used as a place for news more than other platforms. And people who use Twitter, another Pew study found, tend to be more engaged in news and politics — though recent internal analysis suggests interest in news on the platform is waning.
But what we are talking about here is perception. Feeling that Twitter is a place for news and media. And, moreover, that it is a place for left-leaning news and media.
Pew’s poll from 2021 shows wide divisions in partisan perceptions of the platform. Democrats (and independents who tend to vote Democratic, a group referred to as “leaners”) are more likely to say Twitter is good for democracy. Republicans (and Republican-leaning) are more likely to say it’s bad. Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to say they trust news and information posted on Twitter.
The first result is worth keeping in mind in the context of Musk’s acquisition. He often cites Twitter as essential to the health of democratic conversation (small D) — implying that he sides with skeptics about how it currently works, skeptics who tend to be on the right.
That perception stems in part from how Twitter responded to concerns about content on the platform that surfaced around the time of the 2016 election. In addition to facing criticism for facilitating a (relatively toothless) attempt by Russian actors to influence the American political conversation, the platform endured calls to limit abusive and often racist or bigoted posts. It implemented a system that would give those who violated its rules lower visibility.
This was quickly noticed. Conservatives confronted with the downplaying said it was not a function of their own behavior, but of Twitter’s attempt to silence political opponents. Twitter, based in the uber-liberal bastion of San Francisco, was turning the screws to the right in retaliation, they argued. A term of art was coined: “shadow ban”.
It is clear that some users, not exclusively on the right, have been affected by the policy. And it’s also true that Twitter’s standards for acceptable content aren’t necessarily in line with a political right that has increasingly focused on fighting the growing acceptance of marginalized groups as a matter of free speech. What many on the right (including a former president) decry as out-of-control “woke” may be described by others as “vital or discriminatory attacks”. There are edge cases here, as there always are – but, again, we’re talking about perceptions.
In the Pew poll, 6 in 10 Republican (and leaning) Twitter users said limiting the visibility of certain posts — like obscuring election disinformation — was a “major problem.” The same percentage said banning users outright was a big problem. Overall, only 30 percent of Americans saw the former as a major problem, and only a quarter saw the latter that way.
Just before the 2020 election, Twitter (and Facebook) made a decision that crystallized much of this sentiment. When the New York Post reported that it had obtained a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, both social media platforms — wary of again amplifying material that could have been part of a Russian hacking effort — limited how how could the story be shared. From that moment on, perception was locked in place. Twitter wanted to help Democrats. This was then confused with “the media”, which has occasionally been accused of boxing the laptop’s coverage. (Here’s an article in The Washington Post at the time. And here’s a more recent article assessing the contents of the hard drive said to be a duplicate of the laptop — after we were given a copy more than a year Later.)
In this step Elon Musk. Here’s a guy saying what the right says: moderation goes too far, the platform is too hostile to voices from the right. Not only did Musk make an offer to buy the company, but he vigorously trolled Twitter while doing so. And if there’s one thing that gets attention and praise from the political right on Twitter, it’s posting memes against the left or perceived left.
All of this takes place in the context of a long and national campaign by voices on the right against a perceived hegemony of the left. This takes many forms, such as Tucker Carlson’s rants about vaccines on Fox News. But the common thread is that there is a bulwark of essentially left-wing power centers in the media, academia, and entertainment that dictate how Americans speak and act. This narrative has long been useful to Republican officials; providing objective news coverage as bias dilutes the strength of critical coverage. (Trump elevated this particular approach to something of an art form.) But now it has expanded, sometimes moving into surprising, dangerous terrain like the QAnon movement.
But finally, finally, here was Musk. Creating a victory against the left — and on their most prized social media turf. The right’s response to Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been one of broad celebration and an assumption that the perceived political constraints that existed last week will disappear next week. (If not already.) But this isn’t just about tweeting about transgender people. It is about striking the elite’s control over America.
Elon Musk is to technology what Trump was to politics. He is rich and has an ardent fan base to the point of being deafening. Like Trump, he has decided to take over a center of American power to reshape things to his liking.
It’s January 20, 2017, in the Twitterverse. We’ll see what comes next.
