The Times Magazine 5o, Elon Musk has bought
Twitter for $44 billion. This
sentence is an amusingly
uninformative one, because
no one knows a) what he’ll
do with it, b) what Twitter
actually is, or c) just how
much $44 billion is. I mean,
$43 billion is an unfathomable
amount. Even just one billion is an
unfathomable amount. Like Richard Osman,
it’s so, so much bigger than you think it is.
So, what is the man we don’t understand
going to do with the thing we don’t
understand, for an amount of money that
most of us can only really conceive of by
using the sentence, “Elon Musk believes
Twitter is worth 109 Pirates of the Caribbean:
On Stranger Tides”? And does any of it matter?
Well, it matters as much as taxi drivers in
war zones matter to war journalists. In war
reports, “The feeling in the city is...” would
pretty much be whatever the reporter’s taxi
driver had told her/him on the way to the
hotel. And, to be fair, that’s as good a way as
any of judging public sentiment. It’s hard to
know what “the people” think. At the upper
end, when they riot or march or vote, that’s
a pretty good indication of feeling.
The value social media has is that, so far,
it has been one of the best, most specific and
fastest ways of seeing what people think and
feel. No need to wait four years for the blunt
weapon of an election vote! Just observe the
#borisout hashtag. We live in an economy
where knowing what “the people” think is,
potentially, a very powerful and lucrative
thing, with immense political potential.
Of course, there are two problems with
this. The first is that it’s only a certain kind of
“people” on Twitter: only 14 per cent of the
population uses it, and it skews to older, media,
political, academic and activist types. Obviously,
these people are also disproportionately
influential – they’re the ones who, after ten
minutes of observing the day’s Twitter trends,
are going around saying, “Well, people think...”
in columns, reports, blogs and debates, thus
solidifying notions of current “public feeling”
in broader arenas.
And the second problem? It’s rather bigger.
It’s that, since 2012, a lot of the people on
Twitter aren’t people. Long-time users will
remember the summer of 2012, where what
had been a genuinely friendly and pleasant
place suddenly became overrun by anonymousS
CAITLIN MORAN
I’m giving Elon Musk a chance. Here’s why
Let’s find out if Twitter bots and trolls are running our lives
ROBERT WILSONaccounts threatening rape and murder. Shortly
afterwards, the first Twitter storms started- organised pile-ons, from mainly anonymous
accounts, which observably worked to make
being moderate, or centrist, the most difficult
stance to take. Only those with the most
extreme views – on either end of any debate - have tended to stay online: their followers,
bots and trolls attacking their opposition’s
followers, bots and trolls, in endless, rolling
culture wars over feminism, antisemitism,
Corbyn, trans issues, critical race theory, etc.
It seems fairly well established that this was
when Russian interference started on social
media – and if it wasn’t, you have to ask, are
the Russians stupid? If I were Russia, I would
absolutely have gone in studs-up on Twitter.
Because, if you can manipulate the content
and tone of Twitter, an awful lot of people
are going to start saying things like, “Wow – it
has always been my understanding, as a British
person, that ‘Europe’ is our eternal punchline
to any joke about what the most boring thing
in the world is. But, looking on social media,
I see a lot of ‘the people’ are furious about
Europe, and hate it. I guess I’m going to have
to polarise too. Now I’m a Furious Remainer,
and hate 52 per cent of this country.”
Bots can make any hashtag trend. So, given
this, are you actually seeing what “the people”
think – or someone else’s agenda?
Musk has said this is one of the things he
wants to tackle – making Twitter’s algorithms
public, so we can see how and why things
trend, and ensuring there is no possibility of
interference in the forthcoming US elections
is, apparently, one of his primary objectives.
If this really is what he’s going to do – he also
promised the UN $6 billion to tackle world
hunger, but then seemed to “forget” – then
I’m not as worried as others about his fierce
commitment to total freedom of speech. The
biggest problem with, eg fascist nutjobs calling
for violence isn’t so much that they’re saying
dangerous things – more that the “likes” and
retweets these posts get are, almost certainly,
being massively boosted by bots.
Maybe – when we can finally see the stats - we are living through a uniquely hateful and
polarised time. If so, we need to know. But it
might also be we are becoming increasingly
fearful, depressed and angry about “the state
of the world” that doesn’t actually exist. I’m
happy to give Musk a chance at finding out the
answer. At the very least, it’s better than 109
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. n
Maybe we’re
becoming fearful,
depressed and angry
about a state of the
world that doesn’t
actually exist