How, Exactly, Elon Musk Can Fix Twitter
Precisely because the site is so broken, it offers many opportunities for improvement.
As you may have heard, the world’s richest man recently bought the world’s worst social-media platform. Personally, I think that one of the awesome things about having a ton of money is never having to care about Twitter and what people are saying on it, but it seems America’s billionaire class disagrees. Even Jeff Bezos can’t seem to log off.
There’s understandably been a lot of consternation over what new management would mean for Twitter itself. For my part, I subscribe to the Jon Lovett school on the takeover: “Elon Musk owning a stake in Twitter—no one can convince me that this is interesting. What’s he gonna do, ruin Twitter? How would we know?”
Twitter is a medium restricted to 280 characters on which, for some ungodly reason, people try to discuss and debate contentious and complicated issues like politics, religion, and race. It’s a giant arena full of strangers stumbling across the opinions of other strangers that they don’t like, and getting very angry about it. The platform has also manifestly failed to even understand, let alone police, bigotries like anti-Semitism. Courageous individuals have used it to advance important causes, but they have often had to fight the medium every step of the way.
While it’s always possible to make something this dysfunctional worse, it would be a difference in degree, not in kind. But new management also offers the opportunity to completely shake things up. And if Musk wants to do that, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked when it comes to improving the platform—all of which would accord with his stated goals of fostering free speech and increasing transparency.
Eliminate the “Trending Topics” tabs and sidebars. Somewhere in the bowels of Twitter HQ, there is a team of people tasked with picking “conversations” that are popular on the platform and adding them to the “Trending Topics” section with euphemistic captions. This is how “grown adults engage in conduct that would get them banned from Chuck E. Cheese for life” becomes “people discuss whether it’s permissible in some circumstances to eat small children.” Ostensibly a curation of whatever users are talking about at the moment, the trending section often serves as an apt illustration of how the site indulges humanity’s worst instincts. One way to fix this would simply be to make it more honest:
This would be entertaining, but it would be better to stop pushing “trending” content on users entirely, since if they or those they follow are not already tweeting about something, there’s no reason they should be compelled to see it. Users could have the option to add trending content to their experience, but it should not be enabled by default.
This brings us to the most important principle for running a nontoxic social-media platform, which is …
Only show users what they actually choose to see. Currently, Twitter’s interface inundates users with content they never asked for. In addition to the “trending” sidebar, the site also places algorithmically chosen viral tweets beneath replies to tweets that the user actually clicked on. Similarly, Twitter has two modes for conveying tweets to users: a chronological timeline that displays tweets in the order they were posted, and an algorithmic timeline that covertly promotes some tweets and demotes others in a bid to hijack the user’s attention. These timelines are not treated equally by the platform: The algorithmic one is enabled by default, and even when users turn it off, the site sometimes reimposes it, including through platform updates. Essentially, instead of showing people what they signed up to read, Twitter selectively feeds them outside content in a bid to engage and enrage them.
When a social-media site purports to allow users to choose what they see, and to follow what they want to follow, but then filters what they actually get, this violates the trust between the user and the platform. Yet this is how most such sites operate.
Musk has talked about making Twitter’s algorithm transparent so that users can see what it is promoting and suppressing, but this poses its own problems, like making it easier for spammers to exploit the system. A better Twitter would get rid of the algorithmic timeline entirely. It would also make it even easier and more straightforward for users to restrict who can reply to their tweets, so they don’t have to hear from anyone they don’t want to. (This should include quote tweets, which cannot currently be restricted.) Some folks want to engage the entire world, while others just want to talk to their friends, and that’s okay. Let people control their experience, and they will have a more pleasant experience.
Some might argue that eliminating algorithmic and inflammatory trending content would reduce user engagement and thus Twitter’s profits, so even if it’s a good idea, it won’t happen. But ultimately, toning down the bloat and toxicity would improve the user experience, and could just as easily make the platform more attractive to more users in the long run. After all, when a place has a good vibe, more people want to be there. They’d just be different people than the clout-chasing trolls the platform currently attracts.
Ban world leaders who ban Twitter for their own people. Musk has said that he wants Twitter to follow the speech laws of whatever country it’s used in. This presents some pretty thorny problems when it comes to repressive regimes like China that censor what individuals can say on social media. But there’s one simple way that Musk’s principle could be easily and constructively applied: If a country restricts or bans Twitter for its own citizens, its leaders should be banned from the platform. Currently, authoritarian regimes like Iran block Twitter for their general population, while allowing their own officials to use the platform to spread propaganda. In practice, this means that dictatorships are able to speak over their own people on Twitter, with little opposition. Musk should hold them to the same standard as the people they repress. After all, he’s just enforcing their law.
There are many more ways one might improve Twitter—like establishing a transparent set of rules governing suspensions and bans, with punishments clearly delineated and consistently applied—but this is a good start. As a purely cost-benefit matter, it might be better for the world—if not for every individual or my own career—if Musk simply shut down the site entirely. But since I doubt he paid $44 billion to do that, genuinely trying to make the place less toxic would be the next best thing.
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