So this video feels pretty deeply naive. I like Adam Conover, but this kind of sucks.
The gist of it is that Elon Musk is ruining/has ruined Twitter as a platform, but we can't leave Twitter because that's where the audience is so there's nothing to do but nationalize it as a public good. Which, I mean...
First, I'm unconvinced given the trajectory of things that people will actually continue to stay on Twitter. Sure, it's where the party is now, but all parties end. History is littered with the graves of social media platforms and websites - even big ones! MySpace, Tumblr, Google Plus, Orkut, LiveJournal, Digg... remember that one weekend when Hive was real popular? They all died (or at least faded from relevance), and there's no reason to think people won't similarly abandon Twitter in time.
This is especially true if the platform continues to degrade the experience of using it. Whether it's removing the block feature, charging users to post, or the slow but inevitable move to an algorithmic feed, changes are going to keep coming that are going to push users out. It's clear that whatever Musk wants Twitter to be, it isn't what everyone else wanted out of it. So saying "Whelp, everyone's there and there's nothing to be done but stick around" feels ahistorical and even borderline defeatist. I mean, people have already started to leave.
Second, calls to turn Twitter into a public good have been going on since the early 2010's, but it's particularly laughable now. Not just because of the impossibility of getting anything passed in our current broken legislature, but because the site itself has fundamentally changed. Part of the reason that the "Twitter as a public good" idea got kicked around was because it did largely function like a town square or commons, for good and for ill. Everyone was on even footing in the discourse given the chronological feed and reply threading systems. Users prone to impersonation or whose use of the platform necessitated it were vetted and verified to be who they say, allowing for the site to be used by companies, governmental organizations, journalists, or celebrities. It provided news and discourse and avenues for commerce and more.
That platform is not X - a website that has tiered classes of users depending on whether and how much you pay and that has abandoned the verification system for everyone but government entities. You can't hand X over to a public trust as a more-or-less ready-made public good with the ads stripped out; you'd need to either revert to a 2021 version of the platform or start from scratch.
Speaking of which - the video also calls for public alternatives to Twitter. Which, okay, sure, cool! But this is in the same video where the argument is made that Twitter's whole power comes from its massive userbase. I'm not sure "Something a third the size of BlueSky, but run by a PBS funding model" is going to be an answer here. And besides, nationalizing stuff gets weird right away: Is the government doing a 1st amendment free speech violation if it removes Nazi posts on the government-run social media site? Also, should a global media platform be controlled by the American government (or even just an NPR-style government funded independent body)? The video sidesteps not just how we get to a public social media site, but also what it looks like or how it would be implemented. It just asks you to envision an idyllic social media platform (or really just Twitter circa 2017), call it a "public good," and think to yourself "Man, wouldn't that be nicer?" And yeah, sure, some hypothetical utopian version of Twitter would be nicer than the current hellsite. But it's not really an actionable concept.
Look, I'm not saying I don't believe in better worlds than this one - by all means, let's build something better. It's why I deleted my Twitter account and ended up here. But if you're going to stay on the Nazi transphobe's worse version of the hellsite because you don't want to abandon your access to that sweet sweet audience engagement and then argue that that's okay because maybe, somehow, some day it'll be transmogrified into a public good... I just think it's cowardly, is all. Conover isn't even one of the handful of people that legitimately rely on Twitter for work - I can at least entertain the idea that sex workers or artists will have a harder time migrating to other platforms either due to rules against their content/services or because mass numbers of people seeing your posts are necessary to make those endeavors viable (and even then, I still believe it's only a matter of time before they leave the site too). So it feels weird that he wants to hard for sites of hundreds of millions to billions of people to work - and indeed, presumes that they can work.
All of this is tiptoeing around a much bigger issue that I'm too lazy to write up as a footnote to my 'I didn't like this YouTube video' post, but: We're sort of at an inflection point in social media. The model of a handful of companies owning the six social media websites everyone in the world uses has failed. We either need to:
- Acquiesce to being gruel fed into platforms not bent towards the needs of individuals or society but of a handful of capitalist ghouls
- Invent ways to make websites with 300 million to two billion people functional without being owned by tech companies
- Or get ready to return to a world of smaller, manageable communities and websites that aren't driven by engagement, ads, and the interests of capital.
Conover's video makes empty gestures about wishing for option number two while being more than happy to settle for option number one. But I know which way I'm leaning.
