Unsocial Media

However, his actions should teach us why no single individual is responsible for its failings.

Last week, The Guardian closed most of its accounts on the now-branded X platform, ending its engagement with a 27 million-strong audience.

Instead, The Guardian took its business to Bluesky to protest Musk’s support for Donald Trump.

This may sound like a bold move for an establishment liberal newspaper, but the social industry is no longer a boon for legacy news media.

The days when Twitter was an engine of growth for the press are long gone.

The British media class used Twitter for everything from pitching stories to sourcing comments and developing leads. But it was also a means of personal branding and self-promotion.

Every official member of the SW1 class had a blue tick on their account to complete their avatar. It wasn’t just for the big columnists, correspondents, and their editors, in theory.

But the times have changed.

Newsletters and podcasts are now far more helpful for promoting news media than social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, especially for indies like The Battleground.

Many others have followed The Guardian to join Bluesky.

Naturally, right-wingers on X welcomed this exodus, proclaiming their platform the last space for free speech.

Bluesky is an echo chamber for soy boys and snowflakes to populist microbloggers.

This year, X Corp boasted it has 335 million users (not distinguishing between real users and bots), while Bluesky has just over 19 million.

The Bluesky exodus is unlikely to silence Musk’s megaphone. But it’s just achieving momentum, and there’s no telling how much it will grow.

Social media users worldwide have grown progressively alienated by the fascist drift of platforms – both of their owners and users.

If Bluesky can maintain even a semblance of political pluralism in the coming years, it will go a long way towards redressing this imbalance.

Still, there’s reason to worry. As this article was being written, allegations surfaced that the platform had suspended all of its Gaza accounts.

Bluesky denied the story, and supportive pundits claimed they’d spoken to management and that it wasn’t true.

I wouldn’t be worried if this weren’t such a consistent problem for social media. Who’s to say it won’t happen in the future.

We can blame Twitter, in part, for that.

The Death of Twitter

Somehow, we’ve gone from thinking Twitter was the best place for journalism to using it as a vector for conspiracy theories and fake news.

It’s over two years since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and made a series of radical decisions. Pundits were quick to predict its death at the time.

However, X has survived the shock of sacking 80% of its staff and losing many advertisers in 2022 and 2023.

The platform is still a loss-making enterprise, but that’s not the point: X’s value is its user base.

X is the biggest fascist media platform in the world and has the power to influence national elections, such as the one that just took place in the United States.

Accurate or not, X has the facade of a barometer, a global opinion poll that reflects the zeitgeist at any given moment, not a propaganda outlet designed to simulate consensus.

News media still rely on X to gauge popular opinion, even though it does not. Witness the persistence of X feeds on TV news channels despite their lack of verifiable content.

Two years into the Musk era, X is suspending more accounts and removing more content than the old Twitter.

Corporate censorship is still present, but who is being censored may have changed.

X suspended 5.3 million accounts in the first half of 2024, up from 1.6 million in the first half of 2022 (before Musk took over).

These figures come from X Corp’s official report on its own performance. Take that as you will, just like everything the company says about itself.

Even more impressive, X has complied with 71% of legal requests to remove content. These came from authoritarian governments in countries like Turkey.

Before it was sold, Twitter complied with a little over 50% (at most) of these legal requests. So much for Elon Musk’s credentials as a free speech advocate.

What’s changed is how pervasive far-right politics are on the platform.

Everything from militant transphobia to white nationalism is so thoroughly inscribed in X, at the editorial and the algorithmic level, there’s no distinguishing the platform from its politics.

X is an ideologically sealed world where bots and users are indistinguishable and only repeat, metaphorically speaking, what the platform – read Chairman Musk – believes.

It’s a remarkable testimony to tech bro populism and the politics emerging from today’s Silicon Valley. This is precisely why Musk bought Twitter.

Failed Utopia

Elon Musk has pitched his ownership as a move to protect free speech. He reinstated most accounts removed in the late Dorsey era, from Tommy Robinson to Donald Trump.

But this harkens back to the fantasy of early Twitter.

Many people fell for Twitter during the heady days of the Arab Spring and Iran’s Green Revolution.

We believed tweets could help us fight the rich and powerful and topple dictators. This was a popular idea among the media class, in particular.

However, the years since have shown that the liberal press was wrong to invest so much hope in Twitter.

Long before the platform was sold, it routinely banned leftist activists and civil rights organisations and was repeatedly infiltrated by state actors.

Even The Battleground got threatened with termination for tagging then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a tweet.

Let’s not forget the sexual harassment and misogyny.

Many feminists on Twitter faced an onslaught of shockingly graphic rape threats over the years. This was more the norm than nostalgists want to admit.

Over a decade ago, Cristina Criado Perez was bombarded with abusive messages for her campaign to put Jane Austen on the £10 note. These included death threats.

The scale of abusive messages against women was so out of control that Amnesty International published a report on it in 2018.

But this was supposedly Twitter’s golden era, when it was a public space for open exchanges of ideas.

The Internet has changed a lot in the last 30-odd years. Nothing epitomises its idealisation more than the way it got fetishised by the hippie generation.

Unveiled at the 1996 World Economic Forum, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow’s

A Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace is a case in point.

Mistaking connectivity for community, Barlow’s libertarian manifesto saw the Internet as an opportunity to dispense with politics and embrace absolute freedom.

Dystopia Now

Three decades later, the bloom is entirely off the rose.

We now live in an era of technological pessimism, in which the Internet is synonymous with surveillance capitalism and social media is the domain of fascists.

The neoliberalism of self-regulating networks is now the populism of swarms. Libertarians Elon Musk and Peter Thiel best represent this pivot.

This was easily avoidable. Now, social media is seen as the problem because it is supposedly too democratic and allows the spread of misinformation.

The 2008 Obama campaign – which won an award for the best marketing campaign of the year – was celebrated for its use of social media campaigning.

Today, the Trump campaign is viewed differently for using the same tools. With good reason. Obama was no saint, but his white supremacist nemesis makes us yearn for his imperfections.

Not everyone bought into the Internet hype before social media.

The late British journalist Alexander Cockburn was wise enough to see this in 2007 when Barlow’s Woodstock vision was still in vogue.

“It’s not public because we can be taken offline in a nanosecond by a corporate decision, by an edict of government, by someone suing us and shutting us down,” Cockburn said in a debate at the Battle of Ideas conference.

“So it’s not a commons at all,” he said. “It’s private commercial space.”

Cockburn compared the Internet to a shopping mall, where people meet and talk over coffee. In the late 20th century, malls effectively replaced public squares in the United States.

Like the mall, the Internet was a resolutely private space for consumers to congregate. Neither was ever a democratic realm for informed citizens to make decisions.

If anything, Elon Musk has shown us the reality of social media: Twitter was never a public square but a wall to graffiti. What matters more is how it’s used to promote fascism.

We shouldn’t have bought into the Twitter dream in the first place. It was always a fantasy.