Twitter and the Ugly Reality of Social Media We Refuse to Face
It isn’t hard to find evidence of how Musk’s tragedy that was the Twitter acquisition is likely going to destroy Twitter. From business analysts to CEO’s, the consensus seems to be that he is doing a great deal of harm to Twitter and his other companies. What isn’t getting as much coverage is that Musk is exposing what’s wrong with social media as a business, a communications platform, and a framework for social interaction.
The question for all of us is: are we going to — once again — turn a blind eye to these realities that Musk has, unwittingly, uncovered?
Let’s begin with Twitter. I don’t think it is provocative to say that Musk has bungled the acquisition of Twitter and turned it into a company that has a tenuous future at best. A self-described free speech absolutist, Musk has actually proven to be anything but that. He has suspended journalists, banned accounts he didn’t like, botched the verified account rollout, propagated right wing conspiracy theories, and mocked gender pronouns — all in the span of a few short months.
But who really cares about another rich CEO that has a God complex and an incredibly huge blind spot when it comes to self awareness? All of those actions above, plus many others, have exposed the sad reality of social media. A reality that we have seen before (Facebook’s threat to democracy, Instagram’s psychological destruction of a generation of young women, Tumblr’s destruction of an eco-system that supported marginalized voices and helped educate millions of young men and women about sex and sexuality because the federal, state, and local governments decided to restrict access to education and support that young people badly need when it comes to sex and sexuality) and yet, once again, we are doing nothing.
In the span of just a few months, the Twitter take-over has demonstrated just how destructive a tool social media can be to the social fabric of our society and how it can be wielded as a weapon to marginalize people, justify bad acts, and gaslight the masses on an epic level. One might have believed that journalists across the globe would band together and delete their accounts when their colleagues were banned from Twitter in a capricious move by Musk.
Nope. I think a whole bunch of journalists believe that, without Twitter, they may vaporize into the cosmos. Seriously, have you seen what poses as news these days? One line of text with screen captures of tweets — are you fucking kidding me?!
One might have thought that Musk’s reinstatement of certain accounts and his own alignment with right wing misinformation would create a backlash led by business, government, and entertainment figures of note who witnessed how close we came to a collapse of our democracy between early 2016 and 2021.
Nope. God forbid we give up our social media accounts because it may mean we are no longer relevant as an actor, politician, or business leader. Makes you want to vomit.
How quickly and easily the evidence has piled up in only two months that Twitter is:
not safe,
has no integrity,
is simply a tool to make a rich person more money,
is still being used as platform to justify bad acts,
spreads misinformation,
and can be used to vilify other people with impunity.
And yet, most people aren’t doing all that much about it. At this moment in time, the masses have power. Deleting Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and, yes, Twitter is actually easy to do. But people don’t. They rationalize their use of these platforms in so many ways. Making them sound mostly like addicts who refuse to face the fact that they are addicted. We usually pity those people and try to get them help.
Instead, they — you, probably — continue to enable bad behavior but speak of how terrible a boss Musk is, or make snarky comments about Zuck and Facebook. All the while, they — sorry, you — continue to enable and empower the very acts and actions you decry. Legitimizing people who should not be wielding the immense power that you have given them.
As Rick the Hormone Monster is fond of saying, “What are you gonna do?”
- M
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