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Last month, when Elon Musk announced that he planned to buy Twitter, I thought of “South Park,” the rowdy animated comedy series about grade schoolers. One 2016 episode centers on TrollTrace.com, a fictional Web site that’s dividing Americans. The show’s kid heroes visit Musk, who plays himself, at SpaceX, where they hope to destroy TrollTrace with a giant energy source. The plan results in an explosion that engulfs SpaceX headquarters, dashing Musk’s hopes for Martian colonization.
It’s a bad sign when real life evokes “South Park.” And yet Musk—despite some recent hesitations—is preparing to take control of one of the world’s most consequential social networks in order, he says, to save it. Twitter is widely seen as troubled—it rarely makes money and is a source of mis- and disinformation—but it has more than two hundred million active users and exerts a gravitational pull on politics, journalism, and culture. Musk, who has upward of ninety million Twitter followers and says that he is a “free-speech absolutist,” has suggested that he will make sweeping changes to the service, including curtailing moderation, outlawing bots, and reinstating former President Donald Trump, who was banned, in 2021, after the events of January 6th. A consummate troll, Musk also seems to be amusing himself with the acquisition. “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in,” he tweeted, not long ago.
Shortly after Musk’s announcement, The New Yorker e-mailed some people to find out how they are thinking about Twitter these days. What had the platform taught them? How should it change? The novelist Alexander Chee identified one of the network’s most appealing qualities: “it’s a text based social app ultimately, and so it’s perfect for readers and writers.” Twitter, Chee said, had introduced him to a world of readers and writers, stories and poems, while also showing him how “an algorithm can turn someone I like and might ordinarily see a few times a year into the Internet equivalent of the roommate you see too much of.” Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post columnist, wrote that Twitter was “similar to New York City,” in that “the people who spend time there often actively hate it, but refuse to leave.” Even as users are “trauma bonded by collectively suffering through years of bad moderation decisions and regular onslaughts of harassment,”she wrote, Twitter remains “the single most effective real time news platform and the one social media app about ideas rather than aesthetics. . . . It desperately needs to evolve, but whatever sanitized and undeniably better app replaces it will probably never be the same.”
Many people were skeptical about Musk’s ability to improve the service. Kate Klonick, a legal scholar whose work has informed many discussions about content moderation, argued that Twitter’s current norms and rules were, like the wings of birds, the result of an evolutionary process that has balanced competing demands. Musk, she wrote, might be like Icarus, whose feather-and-wax wings melted when he flew too close to the sun—“a man foolish enough to think they can control an organic process shaped by decades of natural evolution.” Icarus risked only himself, but to change Twitter is to experiment with a key part of the world’s communications infrastructure. “Twitter has not destroyed civilization,” the writer Eric Jarosinski, who tweets droll witticisms under the name @NeinQuarterly, said. “But I’d like to think there’s still time.”
Some people tried not to overthink Twitter, perhaps channelling the casual, sunny spirit of its name. “I don’t have anything deep to say about Twitter. I use it and like it,” the Internet-culture visionary Stewart Brand wrote. “Tweet today, gone today,” Joyce Carol Oates observed. The historian Kevin Kruse, whose intellectual tweetstorms have earned him half a million followers, compared Twitter to “the Star Wars cantina”—a polyglot bar full of aliens, in which fights break out and “everyone hates the bots.” By contrast, the journalist Karen Ho, whose Doomscrolling Reminder Bot urges its followers to drink water and take breaks from Twitter, thought mainly of the platform’s impact on our mental health, adding that the way information spreads on Twitter is “worrisome for anyone whose job involves confirming facts and claims with statistics, reporting, and research.”
The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was the only respondent who voiced optimism about the service’s future. (Musk’s Twitter “will be a much better one,” he tweeted this week. “What a moment.”) “I started using Twitter when my blog was shut down by the Chinese government,” Ai wrote, in his response to us. “It was an irreplaceable platform outside China, both for receiving outside information and having my opinions heard abroad.” Ai recalled a conversation that he’d had with the company’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey, in which he told Dorsey that “Twitter for China was like a small opening that allowed rays of sunlight to shine into a deep cave.” It was, Ai thought, “inappropriate to selectively delete Tweets and block Twitter accounts” except in cases of “fake news.” (Musk has called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump “morally wrong.”) “No matter who controls Twitter, if freedom of speech is their motto, it would be a good thing,” Ai wrote. “Twitter should be part of natural phenomena, like weather; sometimes cloudy, sometimes rainy, sometimes sunny, sometimes stormy. This is how Twitter should be.”
Ai is right to compare Twitter to the weather. Although tweets are written in words, Twitter is also shaped by constantly flowing nonverbal currents. Algorithms determine who sees tweets and how fast and far they propagate; a system of likes, follows, and retweets structures our responses to what others say; millions of bots chatter into the ether and follow accounts, gaming the system and shaping our discourse. Recently, Musk tweeted that if the Twitter acquisition “completes”—there’s still a chance that his financing will fall through or that he will change his mind—his version of the company “will be super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware.” In a physical room, speech travels at the speed of sound, but in an online space the air is virtual, and can be altered. Twitter may change in invisible ways, affecting not just the content but the mechanics of our conversation. Musk says that he won’t police what we say—but he will control how we talk.
