Twitter doesn't care about your politics
How indeed?1 Progressives had already declared that the bird app was dead and Elon Musk had killed it, and yet here it was, fluttering along, continuing to send out its relentless stream of inanity, insanity, and incongruity (with just enough substance and amusement to keep us all hooked). How dare Musk and Twitter keep going when the progressive left had assured each other that his business was going down like the Titanic? (And made the Titanic memes to prove it.)
How? Because Twitter didn’t care about their politics. It didn’t and doesn’t care about anyone’s politics. It’s a business not a thermometer of righteousness.
The assumption had been (and continues to be) that Musk was screwing up everything by introducing horrible new ideas (blue checks ✔️ for everyone!), alienating advertisers (Eli Lilly’s stock dropped after a parody Eli Lilly impersonator account tweeted “we are excited to announce insulin is free now”2), and firing staff higgledy-piggledy (although at least Musk hired back the famous Ligma and Johnson3).
All those bad Musk decisions had to lead to Twitter’s destruction, yes? Blue checks (the real ones, not the nouveau bleu poseurs), sure that the end was nigh, started issuing heartfelt tweets of “goodbye” and “it’s been beautiful.”
And then—as Nikole Hannah-Jones and others have started to notice—Twitter had the audacity to still be there the next day, despite all predictions of the Good People.™
Because it was all a vibe, not reality. Progressives wanted it to be true and so convinced themselves it was true.
Progressives hate Musk because he is seen as being on the wrong side of everything (although their actual reasons are a bit vague) and therefore they wanted to believe his business was going to fail. Every negative story about Twitter was blown up (on Twitter, of course) to be further proof that the company was in its final death spiral. Sadly, wishing something to be true doesn’t make it happen, otherwise, I’d be a lot richer than I am!
Kids, this is your brain on motivated reasoning:
There’s also more than a little groupthink and collective panic going down. Everyone is talking about Twitter going under? Twitter must be going under! We are imitative apes and social contagion is real.
A few weeks ago a group of CrossFit runners panicked an entire restaurant into running for their lives because, well, they’re running I’d better run too! It’s the same for Twitter. If everyone else is sure Twitter is going to collapse, I guess it’s going to collapse!
I’m making fun of progressive Musk haters because I think their confidence in Twitter’s demise is funnier but those on the right are being pretty silly too. Every day I see them laying out their 18-tweet threads explaining how Musk is playing 7D chess and will soon be raking in hundreds of billions from his brilliant Twitter strategy. Yeah, sure.
What’s really going to happen with Twitter? I don’t know. I have no inside knowledge. I’ve never run a billion-dollar business or written code for a social media network. I know the limits of my expertise and predicting Twitter’s future is well beyond them. I do know, however, that most of the folks making predictions are equally unqualified. The few who actually have relevant knowledge don’t all agree with one another and are probably only seeing a small piece of the Twitter puzzle anyway.
Sure, it looks like Musk has done some weird stuff. Trolling your own advertisers doesn’t seem smart to me, but what do I know? Firing a bunch of people seems like it might lead to chaos, but maybe the deadwood had to go. The blue check thing seems poorly thought out, but maybe it’s just a rocky introduction of something that’ll work much better down the pike. I don’t know. And neither does anyone else.
By a host of measures, Americans have become hyper-partisan and this has spilled over into almost every area of our lives. Now we’re choosing which chicken sandwiches to eat and what pillows to buy based on which rich so-and-so is backing our side or the other guys. In this context, Twitter becomes one more political football. Progressives have decided that Musk is Dr. Evil and so conservatives must see him as their personal savior. I dropped Musk’s name into the conversation at a Brooklyn party this week and the automatic lip curling was Pavlovian. One young woman said, “I have trans friends, I can’t support Musk!”4 Others called him a "troll" and sneered at his business acumen. (None of them were business people.) That level of hatred blinds people to reality.
And what is reality?
Again, I don’t know. Musk is certainly a troll but that doesn’t make him a bad businessman. It’s ridiculous to think a man who owns two world-transforming businesses—Tesla and SpaceX—can be a complete idiot. That doesn’t mean, of course, that he can’t do idiotic things. His purchase of Twitter seems to have been impulsive (again, I have no inside knowledge). Men successful at some things can fail at others. Perhaps Musk doesn’t have the temperament to run Twitter or maybe he just made a terrible business decision and it will all go up in flames. We also know nothing lasts forever and that includes social media businesses. How’s your MySpace account doing these days?
I realize that if Twitter collapses in a month this essay may look a little silly, but I don’t mind. I know we don’t know and a month from now I’ll still know that we didn’t know. It’ll be annoying if all the doomsaying prognosticators turn out to be right, but I’ll know it’s not because they’re geniuses but because they went along with their crowd and this time running with the herd worked out.
Me, I’ll be chilling, watching the show. I’m curious to see what happens (partly because I have a presence on Twitter), but I’ll try not to let my politics make me root for or against a billionaire. Musk doesn’t care a burnt popsicle stick about me and I’ll return the favor.5
I don’t know what’s up with the timestamp on Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tweet, but somehow I wrote my piece and used her tweet before she even sent it out. I blame Doctor Who.
Musk haters made much of this but the stock only dropped from $368 a share to $349. It’s back up to $361 as of this moment. It was also $286 a mere six months ago. Eli Lilly is doing just fine.
For those not in the know, two guys hung out outside Twitter’s offices and convinced a number of reporters that they were really recently fired Twitter employees named Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson. Ligma and Johnson. Lick my johnson. Juvenile enough for you?
Musk’s main offense is to have sent out some snarky tweets about pronouns, such as “Pronouns suck.” Although, there also seems to be a concern that Musk will allow speech that is hostile to trans people to be freely expressed on Twitter.
EDIT Nov 20, 2022 - Of course, if Musk keeps tweeting Trump porn the way he’s doing tonight, the doomsayers may be righter than I thought!
This is why it's hard to see the Twitter alternatives having any great success. They all seem to have partisanship baked into their design. Apart from anything else, this deprives us from rubbernecking at high profile figures making comments that seem beyond the pale compared to our own beliefs, or even better, sniping at one other in public.
I have no particular opinion of Elon Musk, but the Twitter Drama coming from his tweets is now at a level where I no longer believe in it - it looks like theatre. Blue-check-gate was fun and all, but as a business decision it was so close to the ‘can’t run a lemonade stand’ level of functioning that I can’t actually believe he didn’t see the consequences. I think he’s giving us a show while he does whatever the hell it is he’s thinking of doing