My feelings toward both Elon Musk & Twitter were always mixed. But when the former bought the latter, ambivalence turned to revulsion. I fled the Twitterverse a week after Musk got his keys to the palace and proceeded to fire half the staff, including the entire content moderation team. Hate speech blossomed. A month later the Nazis – welcomed by Musk – stormed the gates. Frankly, it was a relief to be gone. Twitter was like an energy-thief-friend, one that always takes more than he gives. Am I grateful to Musk for driving me away? No, the man defines menace – both to his workers and democracy. But not to worry, America. By choosing to cosplay Icarus, Musk became his own worst enemy. In the process he’s destroying Twitter, a dagger at the heart of democracy and journalism everywhere. Perhaps I should explain. My musings from the last year. . .
Nazis invade the Confederate Attic
There’s irony in why I left Twitter. Because it was Nazis that got me onto it in the first place. I guessthat requires explanation. I had long heard the buzz around Twitter but managedto stay away until the summer of 2017. Then there were these Nazis:
The Nazis in Virginia had gone there to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee, which says it all, both about Nazis and the “Old South” crowd. Birds of a feather and all that. In Trump’s telling Charlottesville was the place with good people on both sides. I’ll let you look at the poster and make your own judgement. Hint: the first nine speakers are either out-and-out Nazis, or Nazi-adjacent. The tenth, Dr. Michael Hill is a southern nationalist from League of the South.
Nazis were not a new thing for me. I had been talking about them for decades to anyone who would listen, trying to warn about the rising and increasingly connected movement of Nazis, Klan and other violent white supremacists. I grew up in 60s Mississippi and understood the danger when no one stands up against them; I’ve closely tracked their progress since the early 1980s. Pre-2000 violent white supremacists were a growing threat but one isolated from the larger society. They were also obsessed with in-fighting, which got in the way of their pipe-dream race-war that would put them on top while redefining America. That dream has been around for ages; the same thing motivated Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh alike. But apart from horrific, randomized violence such as the Sharon Tate murders and Oklahoma City bombing, despite Ruby Ridge and Waco, it wasn’t going anywhere. The internet changed that. It allowed previously isolated individuals to connect online. When Twitter came along it expanded their organizational toolkit.
The horror of Charlottesville Nazis, brazenly marching tiki-torch style, alarmed me enough to write a story which I published on the Daily Kos website: After Charlottesville: Seven key Nazis and their links to Putin & Trump. I then joined Twitter to do my bit, be part of the conversation. Even though I was unknown, my story got some play. The algorithm was kinder to newcomers back in the day. Now it prioritizes the already established.
That was how my Twitter story began. It was the Nazis that got me there, then I got hooked. Not because of the Twitter serotonin but because of the community I found. Communities I should say. There were many. In most I was simply a lurker, hanging around the political/news crowd to listen. In some, like what I’m going to call “Mississippi Twitter”, I became a participant. I also discovered “Black Twitter”, which became one of my favorite things on or off Twitter. Then there were the academic communities organized around history, sociology, archeology and science – showing me things I otherwise would have missed. Twitter became the best way to follow the Russian attack on Ukraine as well. After Putin invaded I added a lot of Ukrainian journalists and military specialists to my feed.
That was Twitter’s good side. Over five years I selected a diverse group of wonderful people to follow on my feed. But still, it left me feeling hollow. And then there was Twitter’s dark side.
Twitter Lizard Brain
There was a world of pre-Musk bad on Twitter too. It was like talking to a rude stranger who’s going to walk away after your first sentence unless you say something really extraordinary. Or really inflammatory. Most opt for the later since it’s easier to burn down community than build one.
A lot of folks in the Twitterverse get hooked on endless doom-scrolling, looking for that outrage-rush. There’s a reason why they do it. When something triggers us, the brain releases neurotransmitters called catecholamines. They hit the Amygdala – that primitive lizard brain inside each and every one of us – and it’s like a five-alarm fire. A lot of people get high on it and keep coming back for more. Trumpist politicians – but not only them – have built careers pushing catecholamine addiction.
Our lizard brain explains how Twitter – along with other social media – helped create the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, admitted as much to Congress. The New York Times reported his testimony:
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said during his congressional testimony onThursday that the site played a role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol onJan. 6, in what appeared to be the first public acknowledgment by a top socialmedia executive of the influence of the platforms on the riot …
“Yes,” he said. “But you also have to take into consideration the broader ecosystem.It’s not just about the technological systems that we use.”
A Sickly Smell of Elon enters the room
Twitter had struggled at content moderation for years but January 6 laid bare their failure to stop harmful actors from using the platform. Within two months of the Trump Capitol insurrection, Twitter finally resorted to mass cancellation of accounts that broke community use rules. They slowly began to reign in the excessive hate. Then Elon entered the arena. He was outraged at the new Twitter controls. Robin Givhan at Wapo said it best:
Musk revels in the freewheeling mayhem that so easily erupts on Twitter. Underlying his vision of Twitter as a digital square is the idea that it should be a place where people can say pretty much whatever they’d like. He equates a public space with breathing freely. But a public space is also a shared one. It isn’t merely a spot where people come together to exchange ideas, it’s also a shared ground where a multitude of different people have to coexist and doing so requires rules and standards and norms. Without them, the public square would essentially be a boxing ring, where strangers pummel each other infrustration and disgust.
I didn’t want to be part of a social media boxing ring. Twitter had too much of that already. I stopped tweeting but waited to see what Elon would do. On the day before Halloween Musk retweeted a scurrilous lie about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, accusing him of responsibility for the hammer attack that nearly killed him. The lie was from a right-wing site known for disinformation. I archived my Tweets (packed my Twitter-bags so to speak) and left.
A month later Musk let Nazi Andrew Anglin back on Twitter. Anglin founded the Daily Stormer website, a place for hard-core Nazis to meet. Hate speech exploded on Twitter and antisemitism then moved off-line into real lives. In March Musk jiggering with his algorithm resulted in hate-speech getting dumped into timelines of users who didn’t ask for it.
I left not a moment too soon.
Twitter in the rear-view mirror
What a strange thing it was, Twitter. What a stupid idea really. Micro-blogging at 140 characters, the cut-off abrupt and merciless, no exceptions even for punctation. What to do when you come up 3 characters long? Drop a period, leave out a comma. Loose the apostrophe on the plural. Spell it funny. Twitter was a merciless editor, bent on teaching bad grammar. Then they rolled out 280 characters. Better. But. Learning to write for the thing was an ordeal. I wasted hours, days, months figuring it out. Twitter is a format best suited to snark kings /queens and bullies; Trump’s claim that he was the Hemingway of Twitter was not wrong. Assuming Hemingway was a blustering bully seeking to destroy American democracy.
Me? I’m not Hemmingway. I hail from William Faulkner country – which is a state of mind as well as a place. Faulkner could pour buckets of words onto page after page without coming up for breath or typing a period. Twitter forced me to abandon my inner-Faulkner. I learned to keep it short & sweet, which was a good. But in the end I wanted to do more than throw snark at the wall, so I gravitated to tweet-threads; multiple little tweet-beads strung on twitter-thread like pearls to make a mini-essay. The pressure’s on, because only the zingers in that thread get any traction. Viral-twitter-traction I mean. Analytics told me it’s usually just the first tweet that gets noticed. Unless you had tens ofthousands of followers, going viral was extremely rare. I had nearly 500 followers; my very top tweet for 2022 was seen by just 23,000. A Tweet about my home state:
Maybe it's time to talk about Mississippi's "fraternity affirmative action program" that puts marginally competent as well as completely incompetent white fraternity members into important governmental & corporate jobs.
Our Governor, Tate Reeves, was one of those frat affirmative action hires and it shows. If you doubt me, take a look at some of his KA frat buddies at Millsaps College.
I nailed that Tweet; but how much good did it do? Only 3.75% of the people who saw the Tweet engaged with it. Virtually no one read the rest of the thread where I explained how the frat-business-government pipeline works in Mississippi. There was no discussion outside my Twitter-bubble, so the real-life impact was zilch. But when I saw I had gotten 70 re-tweets there was that hit of serotonin that made me feel pathetically good. Seventy re-tweets was a lot for me but a tiny drop in then Twitter ocean of 500 million tweets a day. That feel-good rush lasted 15 minutes. Max.
When I thought “Is that allthere is”, I wasn’t alone. According to Pew research 67% of Twitter users thought that only a few see their content; “21% think nobody sees it”. If you want to feel truly insignificant, you can lay on damp grass and stare at the night sky. All those stars. Stretching back 14 billion years.
Or you can go on Twitter.
Other research shows that 97% of all American Tweets are created by just 25% of American users. Elon Musk gets tens of thousands of re-tweets for every gem he writes. This one from pre-takeover Elon was re-tweeted 94,700 times:
Chocolate milk is insanely good. Just had some.
Soon after that Tweet, Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
end of part 1
part 2 will come tomorrow
If you want to read the whole thing now, it’s on my substack.