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Earlier today, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk made an offer to buy Twitter, and not only was it immediate front-page news across the land, but it created an immediate, anguished outcry on the website itself. I had a different reaction. Musk is trying to buy a broken website that’s helping break our culture, and that website might be beyond repair.
To understand the news event, we have to understand a few facts about Twitter, its users, and its effect on our culture. Taken together, these facts paint a picture of a website that is relatively small (compared to the rest of social media), disproportionately influential with the political elite, and distorts both the right and the left in deeply destructive ways.
If you look at a chart of popular social-media sites, you’ll note that you have to look far down the list to find Twitter. It’s way behind Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. It’s below a host of foreign social-media sites. It’s below even Telegram and Pinterest. It sits just above Reddit as the 15th-most-popular social-media site in the world.
But that’s not all. Only a small slice of Twitter’s users are active. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, only 10 percent of tweeters create 92 percent of all U.S. tweets. Combine all the numbers, and 3 percent of the American population creates 90 percent of all tweets. In other words, only a small minority of one of the smallest of the “significant” social-media sites produces any real content.
But the problems don’t stop there. The users and the content creators are not evenly distributed across the political and cultural spectrum. As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl pointed out, Twitter’s overall user base is so Democratic (D+15) that they would tie Hawaii and Vermont for most liberal state, and its power users are so Democratic (D+43) that they match the second-most-Democratic congressional district in America.
This political skew isn’t inherently problematic. After all, different kinds of products appeal to different consumer cultures, and red and blue Americans tend to have rather different commercial tastes. But there’s one problem that’s unique to Twitter—it’s the social-media platform of choice for virtually every journalist and political influencer in America.
Almost all of my journalist peers are on Twitter (I can think of only one or two exceptions), and when I say “on” Twitter, I mean “on it hours per day.” If politicians aren’t on Twitter, their young staffers certainly are. And so is the creative class across the length and breadth of publishing, Big Tech, and entertainment.
That means that Twitter punches well above its traffic in raw cultural impact. And that cultural influence is harmful to both sides of America’s partisan divide.
Spend much time reading the right on Twitter, and the first thing you’ll notice is a sense of almost-constant crisis. Everything is lost. Everything is slipping away. The left is ascendant, and therefore desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s exactly the kind of feeling one might expect if you spent your life in, say, Barbara Lee’s congressional district in Berkeley. Conservatism simply doesn’t have much purchase there.
But the dominance of the left has its own pitfalls for Democrats. According to Pew, Democratic Twitter users are to the left of the average Democrat: “Some 60% of Democrats on Twitter describe their political leanings as liberal (with 24% saying they are ‘very’ liberal), compared with 43% among those who are not Twitter users (only 12% of whom say they are very liberal).”
As a result, it’s easy for the cultural elite to think not only that the United States is more left than it is, but also that the Democratic Party is more left than it is. In 2019 Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy published arguably the single-most-insightful analysis of the Democratic electorate of the entire election cycle:
The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.
There, in one paragraph, is a key reason why Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination and a key reason why so many online analysts wrote him off far too soon. He was out of step with Twitter, but he was in step with the majority of Democrats.
It’s important to understand that Musk’s offer—even at an above-market stock price—does not mean that Twitter will sell or will have to sell. Twitter is a Delaware company, and Delaware law gives broad discretion to corporate boards to accept or reject even above-market buyout attempts.
But let’s assume for the moment that Musk prevails. What happens next? It’s likely that you’ll see a shift in Twitter’s moderation policies (and the return of Donald Trump). Some of those policy changes might be beneficial. Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden–laptop story, to take one example, did more harm than good.
When the story first broke, Twitter Safety announced that it was imposing its “hacked materials” policy on the contents of Biden’s alleged hard drive, noting that it has a policy that “prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization.” Yet it had recently permitted the widespread sharing of New York Times stories about Trump’s tax returns.
Moreover, as censorship so often does, Twitter’s action gave the story an immense amount of additional reach in right-wing media. Not only did right-leaning media report on the hard drive itself; they also reported at length about Big Tech’s unfair censorship. Twitter’s ideological blindness did real damage.
But if Musk tries to end any reasonable moderation, he’s going to run into the Gab problem. Gab, for readers who don’t know, is a almost-no-moderation “competitor” to Twitter. The reason you’ve likely not heard of Gab is that there’s only a very small market for truly unfettered speech online. As a general matter, people don’t like to swim in sewers.
It’s one thing to change Twitter to make it more fair. It’s another thing entirely to change Twitter to make it more toxic. Its culture is already so vicious that few public figures truly enjoy interacting on the site. They have something more like a hate/need relationship with the platform. They hate the social dynamics, but they feel like they still need to reach their peers and their followers.
Make Twitter more toxic, and an increasing number of people might find that their hate overrides their need and leave the platform entirely. In fact, Musk himself recently noted that a number of Twitter’s top accounts rarely post. It’s not hard to see why, and it’s not because Twitter is too far left. Or because moderation is unfair. It’s because the site is often more trouble than it’s worth.
That’s what’s broken about Twitter, and it’s unclear to me that Musk, or anyone, knows how to fix a niche social-media site that succeeds mainly in radicalizing or enraging its narrow but influential base.