Musk’s buyout of Twitter — impact speculations and reflections

So we all got the news today — Elon Musk bought up Twitter for tens of billions of dollars, money that could easily have gone toward elminating homelessness or many other critical domestic and global causes. In fact, he had earlier told the UN that he would pay them $6 billion to end world hunger if they could show him how they would use that money. They provided this information to him and he ghosted them. Then he bought Twitter for $45 billion. A story not unlike how he promised that he would replace all the lead pipes in Flint — and then ended up just sending a dozen schools water filters.

There are multitudes of stories illustrating Musk’s red flags. At Tesla, Black Tesla employees claimed that when the CEO was coming they had to ‘move to the back’ because the CEO ‘didn’t want a Black face up there.’ There are numerous examples of problems a Musk CEO-ship may carry. The biggest being that if he invites Trump back it could open the flood-gates to all the toxic, racist, disinformation that prior Twitter tried hard to purge, from Nazi’s to Qanon and more. Not surprisingly, these groups are celebrating today’s purchase, especially as Musk signals that the first changes he makes will be about ‘free speech.’

This notion of ‘free speech’ of course raises the question — when a corporate billionaire with other businesses owns a communication platform, what will become of content critical of his interests? Criticism of Tesla or discussions of union organization aside (Tesla has sued to squelch critics, violated labor laws and moved to Texas to avoid labor unions), he owns a Tesla factory in China and wants to expand. What happens if Beijing pressures him about content in Uyghur or Hong Kong accounts? What will his stance be about Chinese disinfo bots?

And probably most troubling is a concern raised today by Emily Bell, Prof and Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, how crazy it is that..

a company with a significant dataset of private and public communications, that has municipalities, companies and governments on the platform, can switch ownership with pretty much zero scrutiny.

Ryan Grim, DC bureau chief at The Intercept, remarks that

Any oligarch who buys major media or a major platform should have to divest from their other companies. Seems like basic antitrust policy.

Another concerning observation of Bell’s is that

There also seems to be some misunderstanding about what deleted tweets mean. Deleted from the public timeline — yes. Removed entirely from Twitter servers…

She continues that..

One of the most ironic likely outcomes of a Musk/Twitter deal is that it will potentially prove a trigger for increased regulation around the ownership of such protocols / platforms.

We can only hope.

In the meantime we have millions of users on Twitter who are looking for somewhere else to go. Users who don’t feel safe in a Musk version of Twitter, where racists, neo-nazis, misogynistic, anti-LGBT trolls get to return — are looking for alternatives. People who network academically, professionally, are wondering where they can go to share information without becoming bogged down in disinformation and toxicity. Cultural, political activists are pledging to stay and fight, and there are certainly fights to be fought across the country right now — from women’s health, LGBT children’s rights, children’s rights to supportive and inclusive education, voting rights. There are families going on Twitter to find out what states are safe to move their children to, because states are cracking down on gay and trans rights. But will Twitter protect these conversations or will they become an increased vector for harrassment and disinformation campaigns? Is it better for users to leave Twitter to become a toxic ghost town of bullies like Parlar, Truth Social or GTTR? It’s hard to say right now. Many are taking a wait and see approach.

I’ve established a couple life preserver alternatives elsewhere for now — Commonground Social (which has been down all day) and the unfederated Mastodon. I also run a Discord server and belong to a number of Discord servers. Each provide a different experience. The first two offer a structural UI most closely like Twitter — but it remains to be seen if people are able to re-connect with all their followers on these platforms. Whether Musk turns Twitter into the new MySpace, whether his purchase becomes the center of federal scrutiny, or some other unforseen outcome — time will tell.