Elon Musk’s rule over Twitter has made me better appreciate the app’s original attraction, and what I’ve learned in the process has made me marginally more optimistic about North American democracy.
Don’t get me wrong: I find the new CEO to be a man with an empty chest, shrouded by nothing but the love of capital and the ego necessary for the American oligarchy. I have no love for the rich man. That said, I’ve been pretty convinced that Twitter—and, even more so, the larger insulated media ecosystem the app represents—was detrimental to healthy civic and political discourse.
Since taking over Twitter, he’s committed, uncommitted, and re-committed a few times over to several disastrous decisions, including but not limited to un-banning insurrectionists who had violated Twitter’s user policies by advocating for the violent overthrow of the government, censorship of the opposition in Türkiye, and the elimination of the meaning behind the “verified” status. And, in accordance with his public character track record, he’s helped propagate racist posts and misinformation.
Liberals, at least the ones in the circles I float between, have decried the destruction of the app, though they continue to use it without any abandon. More importantly, nothing has fundamentally changed in the app’s actual interface beyond the algorithmically unusable “For You” tab. And none of the Twitter alternatives have yet to prove a viable replacement. I have a theory behind this: the most suitable replacements in terms of replicating the functions of the app—particularly Mastodon, Parler, and Truth Social—only offer an insular community of like-minded online groups. (Notwithstanding Bluesky, which isn’t available to most of the public yet but will almost certainly suffer the same echo-chamber fate.) And I think, or at least I want to believe, that the reason Mastodon and Parlor never stood a chance is because they failed to replicate the open-ended, bubble-resistant world of Twitter.
Musk’s lousy management of Twitter has made visible, at least to me, the appeal of the app in the first place: your one or two sentences have the ability to reasonably reach an Indonesian nationalist, a French Jesuit, and a bisexual political science grad student from Texas all at once. That may be an eclectic bunch, but it’s also a sampling of some of my closest and longest-lasting Twitter friends. I’ve also had digital interactions (accompanied by varying degrees of pleasantness) with the personal accounts of Richard Dawkins, James Gunn, Armond White, and Cory Booker. All of this is to say, for better or for worse, it was never really possible to gatekeep your Twitter the same way Bluesky proposes. We feed off the ideological mismatching and trolling inherent to Twitter’s diverse social environment.
To return to my theory, for which I have absolutely no supporting evidence, I’ll just say this: if we, as a democratic collective, truly desired to remain isolated in our own ethnic and political communities, I don’t think Twitter ever would have worked.
Joshua Polanski (’20) is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, In Review Online, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking and exhibition, slow and digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern film.
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Agreed on all fronts. I am as guilty as any other user of participating in ~the discourse~ but I can’t deny that I’m beginning to mourn twitter’s various losses of functionality, including being reached by stuff I wouldn’t have known to seek out. TikTok does something similar, I guess, but that platform has its own share of issues.