Elon Musk just bought Twitter. Does it signal the return of Donald Trump and his outrage machine?

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This article was published 24/04/2022 (933 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON—As long as I’ve been on Twitter, people there have been complaining it ain’t what it used to be.

First, people thought it had been better as an all SMS-text service with users punching messages from the number pads on flip phones. Then it had been better before it expanded the character count, or introduced a retweet button. It had especially been better before any monkeying with algorithmic timelines. The problem of gang-tackling mobs cancelling or hurling abuse at people has always seemed to be worsening (a problem suffered notably more acutely by women and people of colour). There have been complaints about rising numbers of skeezy characters sliding into direct messages, bumps in unsolicited pornography, more widely shared disinformation.

At every turn, to listen to a great number of the people who have used it the most, Twitter has always been just on the verge of becoming unusable, intolerable or plain dangerous.

In that respect, there ain’t much new in Twitter users declaring that social media Armageddon is nigh with the purchase of the service by Elon Musk.

Exactly why the world’s richest man — an impulsive iconoclast with a messiah complex who is trying to save the planet with electric cars while attempting to escape it through space travel — wants to own Twitter is a bit of a mystery. Even for him, the purchase price of $44 billion is a big chunk of change, and seeing how it can turn him a profit is difficult. He hasn’t articulated much of a detailed vision for what he’d do with it.

The spare vision he has shared, alongside his general persona and personal tweeting habits, is what worries many of those threatening to quit the platform. He sees it as the world’s “de facto town square” that needs to be more dedicated to “free speech” to adequately fulfil that role. That likely means, we are left to surmise, less suppression or labelling of misinformation, less content moderation and less banishing of problem users. Especially, many guess, one specific problem user whose American presidency was defined in large part by his use of Twitter as a megaphone that drove daily news cycles.

Now, here’s where I point out that in many respects — maybe most — the old-timers sitting around singing “Glory Days” about how the whole thing is going to hell have often been right. In addition to sometimes being a useful news source and a way to hear directly from world-leading experts in real time, Twitter has also been a toxic cesspool where careers are ended by impulsive jokes, people are harassed to the point of depression or worse, misinformation is spread and conspiracy theories are cultivated.

But in that respect, it is just another component of the social media age, in which we’re all addicted to staring at things on our phones that make us loonier, lonelier and angrier.

Daily Twitter users, for whom the fate of the service’s ownership and moderation policies is a source of pressing concern, are not that big a slice of the population. Pew Research Center found last year that 81 per cent of Americans used YouTube, 69 per cent used Facebook, and 40 per cent used Instagram. Twitter trailed Pinterest and LinkedIn with only 23 per cent ever using it. As far as cultural influence, the kids today are all TikToking and Twitching, not tweeting. In Canada, about 6.45 million adults are reported to use Twitter; about half of those are daily users, which is a lot of people, but it’s still only about 10 per cent of the population checking the service every day.

Most people aren’t on Twitter. So for most people, Elon Musk buying Twitter isn’t going to change their day-to-day lives very much.

Except that among those who use the service, and use it a lot, are the journalists and cultural commentators who find it valuable — as I still do — for tracking the public messages of newsmakers, and for following or sharing minute-by-minute details of breaking news. It was this constituency that for a long time made Twitter so valuable to former U.S. president Donald Trump — and, in a way, to the army of “own-the-libs” trolls who follow him.

When Trump used Twitter as a podium to impulsively shout to his followers, the entire U.S. press corps would see what he said — and that would often become the story of the day. Likewise, misinformation purveyors and outrage mongers could tweet something ridiculous, knowing that the reaction to it would be loud, and that the fight itself would catch the eye of journalists, and become a story in a way that shouting the same thing into a megaphone in a traditional town square would not.

When Trump and some others were kicked off Twitter in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, that particular type of news cycle receded. The few right-wing social media startups that emerged to provide a replacement home for this unbridled free speech, including one run by Trump, have mostly been reported to be digital ghost towns. Without a mass of offended users to respond to their content — and the mainstream media following along to make a story out of the fight — where’s the fun for Trump or those like him in posting?

If Musk reverses those user bans and content moderation policies just in time for Trump to run for president again — and if Trump were to come back to Twitter, which so far he’s said he will not — it isn’t hard to imagine that outrage-industrial complex springing back to its old form.

In which case, for once, people could complain that Twitter is what it used to be. And it wouldn’t only be the service’s users who would notice.

Edward Keenan is the Star’s Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca