THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT

Hi there, here’s what you need to know for the week of December 9, 2022, in 10 minutes.

THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

① Right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk want to control Twitter because they understand how it punches above its weight as a social platform

② For the platform to maintain its abstract value, that means it has to remain either influential to elites, or an irresistible font of political gossip of the kind that tipped the 2016 election

③ The dream of reinstalling the hard right to power is why Musk et al will go to great lengths to prevent Twitter from falling back into responsible hands; fortunately, Democrats just won the power they need to compete with the right in the information wars for the next two years

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PLAYING THE ELON GAME

In my two week absence, Elon Musk dragged Twitter back to the bad old days of 2015 and 2016, when armies of fascist trolls stood ready to torment anyone (but particularly women and ethnic and religious and sexual minorities) who use the service to advance liberal ends.

Then, after that decision fed a horrifying antisemitic spectacle and meltdown featuring Kanye West and Donald Trump, Musk changed the topic by mining Twitter’s vast internal communications to advance a false Republican storyline about Twitter’s “collusion” with Democrats to help Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.

Against that backdrop, I interviewed Kara Swisher, who seems skeptical that these developments will have any material or political consequences in the real world, beyond the freakshow spectacle. 

Here, without hazarding any predictions or assuming that Musk can marshal his control over Twitter in precise ways, I want to lay out what I think he thinks the point of all this is, why he and his GOP allies are ecstatic about how this is all going, and thus will they'll fight so hard to maintain the new status quo. 

① ELITE OR DEFEAT

For any of this to make sense, it really helps to be part of the regular churn of political Twitter, which over time will give you a feel for why Twitter is powerful, despite being a fraction of the size of other social media networks and basically unprofitable. Twitter doesn’t influence the world by putting ideas or arguments or lies in front of so many eyeballs that it affects mass perception through scale. Rather, Twitter is a place where people with access to eyeballs, and even to the direct levers of power, learn about what’s happening in the world, and gather their opinions about what it all means. 

It is not uncommon to watch ideas leap seamlessly from Twitter thread into the churn of U.S. policy making or political strategy or mainstream news media. As long as influential elites continue to use it the way they use it, having control over what dominates political discourse on Twitter will affect what our political leaders choose to prioritize, what candidates choose to talk about, what journalists choose to cover. 

From where I sit, then, if Musk wants to maintain the abstract value of his purchase for the long haul he will need to strike a balance of some kinds that preserves the aspects of Twitter that make it such a powerful tool for journalists, researchers, policymakers, etc, while also changing the overall tenor of what crosses into people’s feeds. Think of Fox News (“fair and balanced!”) in the days before a critical mass of elites finally accepted that Fox was simply part of the GOP propaganda apparatus—before its white-nationalist power hours drove advertisers away and it entered its symbiosis with Donald Trump. If Musk degrades Twitter until it becomes like Gab or Truth Social or any of the other low-rent, right-wing microblogging platforms, it will lose its agenda-setting power, and thus the main reason an ideological billionaire might want to own it.   

But in a way, that might be one of the better of several plausible scenarios.

② LEAK AND DESTROY

Consider another scenario—one where Musk continues this “anything right-wing goes” regime, save for occasional high-profile suspensions and expulsions of unrepentant Nazis like Kanye West, and continues using his control over the company to run and amplify propaganda feints like the recent TWITTER FILES rollout. 

Elite usage patterns might start to change in that case, but Twitter itself will still be a wellspring of political news. Then we’re basically left hoping that Musk and his ideological partners remain too clumsy about this stuff, and mainstream media journalists too wise to them, to overrun our national discourse with nonsense and distractions.

The obvious, first-order purpose of TWITTER FILES is to saturate both Twitter and other media with credulous, hyperventilating coverage of a supposed conspiracy that all participating parties know to be fabricated. If successful, it will replicate the feeding-frenzy environment of 2016, when all media became overrun with information about Hillary Clinton’s emails, and, later, the emails that Trump-aligned Russian hackers stole from prominent Democrats. It will also create enough odor of wrongdoing to lend credence to GOP assertions that Twitter, through its alleged-but-fake collusion with Democrats, cost Trump re-election—a funhouse version of the very real 2016 Russian election-subversion scandal. 

It mostly failed in that regard so far. And if that’s how this goes generally—well, OK, it’ll be really embarrassing for the people involved, and damaging to an important platform, but we can take solace in schadenfreude that Musk can’t figure out how to wield his new power for nefarious ends.  

But I don’t see any reason beyond recency bias to assume Musk won’t try to innovate in the ratfucking realm. 

In the course of seeding TWITTER FILES with his favorite mercenary writers, Musk didn’t just leak deliberative communications internal to Twitter. The documents included emails outside parties sent to Twitter employees, under the expectation that they’d remain private. Here the purpose wasn’t primarily to damage the emailer. In this specific case, the email came from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who wrote in with some gentle criticism of Twitter’s short-lived effort to contain the spread of a New York Post story about the stolen contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. And Khanna comes across looking very independent minded. But the fact that Musk included his emails, only to buttress the false storyline about malfeasance at Twitter, puts us on the wrong side of a big red line.

If a private communication has crossed Twitter’s servers, Musk now controls it, and if he’s willing to publicize a handful of emails to advance personal or political vendettas, we can’t really assume anything is safe. Including, apparently, direct messages. Now imagine how many communications he has at his disposal—not just emails to Twitter executives, but DMs to them, or even just DMs between powerful people. What if he decides leaking them is useful? And what are the chances that none of them are juicy enough to get the 2016 media EMAILS machine whirring up again?

Even if he stops playing the part of Wikileaks and Wikileaker all in one, Musk has already set in motion a chain of events that could end in alarming places. Republicans, after all, are undaunted by the fact that TWITTER FILES is nothing more than a bunch of B-actors holding their noses, pretending they smelled a fart. That’s their core competency! When they take control of the House in a few short weeks, they’ll have the power to replicate what Musk did at Twitter throughout the tech world. They have already spun up a fantasy in which an imaginary conspiracy that didn’t actually engulf Twitter and the Biden campaign actually spread throughout Silicon Valley, and that they’ll find evidence of yet more collusion at places like Facebook and Google. 

More noses pinched, more fingers pointed. And if that's all it was, you might think "who cares?!" Republicans have been bullying tech platforms into privileging right-wing propaganda by leveling false accusations of bias and censorship against them since at least 2016. But keep in mind, the half-baked version of this conspiracy theory already drove the leader of the GOP to propose terminating the Constitution.

③ NO BAD DEED GOES UNSUBPOENAED

The x-factor in all this is that Musk has submarined Twitter’s ad revenue and also saddled it with enormous debt, creating a solvency problem that even his drastic cost-cutting measures probably can’t solve. It’s thus conceivable that Musk won’t be running Twitter for very long, and that whoever assumes control in his place will try to restore some semblance of the pre-October status quo.

That would be the least-bad outcome, but I just don’t think it’s very likely. As Kara noted in our conversation, Musk is rich enough that he can just buy out his jilted investors at a discount. But however that math gets sorted out, I have a hard time imagining Musk and his very wealthy acolytes allowing Twitter to fall back into responsible, non-partisan hands. 

The libs are owned, after all, which means more to these guys than a few marginal billion dollars. Some of them surely thrill just as much to owning the libs as to the first-order amplification of fascist ideas. But the value proposition here isn’t entirely abstract; you can also think of it as an internally hedged bet. 

For all the ways what they’re doing here rhymes with 2016, I think they really are trying to recreate the actual dynamics that prevailed during that election. They know, because they benefited from it enormously, that Trump won the 2016 election by a trivial Electoral College margin; that but for a media ecosystem flooded with nonsense, he would’ve lost. And they imagine, not unreasonably, that something like that could happen again. That they might even be able to will such a scenario into existence. And if they succeed, their reward will be huge tax cuts, a revived war on unions, helter-skelter deregulation devised in its particulars to benefit GOP soldiers like Musk. If you and your buddies have a collective net worth of hundreds of billions of dollars, why not gamble a few billion dollars on that? 

The good news in all this is that Democrats will have 51 Senate seats next year (Kyrsten Sinema's attention-seeking notwithstanding) which means they will have subpoena power, and can at least in theory match House Republicans subpoena for subpoena, investigation for investigation, aimed at genuine wrongdoing, which would go a long way toward drowning out the Republican disinformation machine.

In perhaps slightly ill-advised remarks celebrating victory in the Georgia runoff election, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer observed, “We have subpoena power, which we didn’t, and everyone says ‘well, you know, you don’t want to subpoena the Biden administration.’ No! But we can subpoena all kinds of corporate bad deeds, climate bad deeds, all kinds of other things.”

Like the “Things” in Linens ‘n Things, and the “Beyond” in Bed, Bath & Beyond, a whole universe of possibility resides in the part he didn’t enumerate. It’s where all the uninvestigated Trump scandals lie, including ones that have come to light since he left office (a $2 billion Saudi bribe to Jared Kushner?) that became extremely urgent when he announced his third presidential candidacy. 

But just in the realm of “corporate bad deeds”—Twitter is a corporation. Fox News is a corporation, one that was reportedly under a sprawling federal criminal investigation until it mysteriously vanished under Bill Barr. While neither old Twitter nor the Biden campaign did anything wrong as they grappled with the genuinely bizarre, suspicious, revenge-porny circumstances surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Trump administration (that is, the actual government) repeatedly attempted to bring corporate media to heel through abuses of government power that went largely uninvestigated. 

If I were Schumer, I’d start there; the alternative may be to cede the mantle of free speech to the censorious would-be dictators now claiming it in bad faith.

Big Tent was off last week because I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, where I had the honor of addressing the World Press Institute’s New Horizons in Journalism Conference. It was a great event. You can watch the whole thing here. 

Before I left, Jon Favreau and I recorded a Positively Dreadful/Offline crossover episode where we aired out an internal debate we’ve had about whether Democrats could be better fighters in the information wars, and what that might look like. Listen to the whole episode here (or elsewhere on the PD feed, obviously).

If you’re new to the Hunter Biden laptop pseudoscandal, and found any part of the above confusing as a result, this Kevin Drum recap will be extremely helpful.

Though he omitted this key piece of the scandal!

Highlight of the week right here.

OK, tied for highlight of the week.

The long and short of it…

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