Matt Taibbi, a journalist whose writing I admire, has joined the throng decrying the hypocrisy of pundits who write on the pages of the Washington Post (owned by a billionaire) that if billionaire Elon Musk buys Twitter it will be a threat to democracy. This is too glib. The problem isn’t billionaires owning media outlets, or the hypocrisy of pundits writing on platforms owned by billions saying that billionaires shouldn't own media platforms; the very rich have dominated media for much of the life of the republic, and many of them oversaw the growth of our most outstanding publications, e.g. the Fleischmann family and The New Yorker, or the Sulzbergers and The New York Times. Today, given the deteriorating value proposition of almost all media, we need the very rich to keep storied outlets alive. The issue with Musk has to do with what he has said he wants to do with the outlet -- strip it of its moderators. That indeed is a threat to democracy. The lesson of the digital era is that without intermediaries, information outlets degrade into a cesspool of spin, disinformation, agitprop, unfounded conspiracy theories, exhibitionism, racism, sadism, and porn.
In Silicon Valley disruption is a good thing, but not all disruptions pave the way for something better. As everything has shifted online over the past few decades, the shedding of intermediaries stands out as the most pervasive and destabilizing side-effect of this transition. In financial markets that has meant the disappearance of brokers and market makers, and the rise of ETF’s, index funds, bizarre meme stocks, and arcane quant strategies that whipsaw markets and mystify market veterans. In the world of information, it has meant the disappearance of editors and fact checkers, the erosion of the hold of the dominant print and network brands, and the rise of social media, blogs, ezines, and a flock of personalities who can distribute opinions, information, and disinformation with little or no vetting whatsoever.
On the internet, with a modicum of copy editing and design, everything looks equally authoritative, and the online world turns out to be perfectly designed to optimize the human tendency for confirmation bias (particularly given the algorithms that govern news feeds on the big social media platforms). If you’re on the edge of going down a rabbit hole, the algorithm, like Lloyd, the Satanic and imaginary bartender in The Shining, is there to give you a gentle shove over the edge. Does anyone think that batshit crazy fringe alternative reality games like Qnon could have metastasized as quickly and extensively as they did without the internet?
Another transformational aspect of the internet is that no matter how fringe or eccentric an obsession one might entertain, there is now a community that will welcome you. In a country of 330 million people, even the rarest of niches can become pretty big – if like-minded people can find each other, which they now can courtesy of the internet. For instance, an estimated 12 million Americans believe that we are secretly ruled by lizard people, malevolent aliens who came to earth long ago. If one percent of that group is crazy enough to act on their belief, that’s still 120,000 people, and they can now find each other and plot violence. It’s arguable that the Jan. 6 insurrection would not have happened had not scantily moderated social media platforms such as Gab, Parlor, 4Chan as well as more moderated platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram allowed organizers to coordinate the attack, and muster and incite the mob.
Could moderators (the people who perform the intermediary function for social media platforms) have aborted the attack? To answer this question, first think about what might have happened before the advent of the internet. No major news outlet would have published a call for violent insurrection on Jan. 6, and those fringe publications that did call for violence, would have reached isolated, small groups. In a non-digital world, Jan. 6 wouldn’t have happened (and, in fact, didn’t happen). By contrast, online interconnectedness means that even if the big platforms rigorously police their content for violent incitement, the internet is porous enough that extremists would be able to find each other, issue calls to action, and coordinate their efforts. That said, if the biggest platforms had rigorously moderated their content, the insurrection would have been smaller, and probably easier to block from breaching the capitol. As with poisons and drugs, dosage is everything, and the internet amps up dosage by orders of magnitude.
This brings us back to Musk and his bid for Twitter. He has claimed to be a free speech absolutist, which strongly implies that he would dial back moderation of content. Presumably that means reinstating Trump and his giant salad bowl of lies, distortions, insults and grievances. Presumably, that also means opening the gates to trolls, propagandists, and extremists. It would also pave the way for those who would mobilize the next attack on Congress. If we’ve learned anything from two plus decades experience with the online world, it’s that, particularly in the world of information, we need more intermediaries and moderators, not less.
Nor is this a matter of free speech, as Twitter is a private company. I don’t hear anyone calling for Disney to distribute porn (indeed, DeSantis, supposedly a free speech advocate, is calling for Disney to muzzle itself on gay rights). Should Musk prevail in his bid (and he’s subsequently provided evidence that his bid was performative and not serious), he might also discover that not only is unmoderated content bad for democracy, it’s bad for business. Less moderated sites such as Parlor have trouble finding, much less maintaining audiences that are a tiny fraction of Twitters’.
Despite the promise of the internet to flatten the earth since everyone now has access to the accumulated wisdom, science, and art of all of humanity, what we’ve discovered is that our citizenry is less informed than ever, susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, and often unable to distinguish between fact and disinformation. This is an indictment of our educational system, but it also points towards the need for moderators, editors, producers and fact checkers to do the job that used to bolster trust in journalism. Given the power of the internet to connect and distribute, without intermediaries, we’re effectively putting a baby in a room with a nuclear button, and if we don’t bring back adult supervision we shouldn’t be surprised at the results.
