I must respectfully dissent from the National Review editorial and my colleagues such as Michael Brendan Dougherty who have written about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter as if it’s some unalloyed good thing.
The editors write,
Just as we hope that a future Republican Congress does a thorough investigation of our nation’s public-health response, we hope Musk’s takeover of Twitter brings about an audit of this era’s social-media policies.
A republic dedicated to liberty needs not just a free media, but media institutions that are themselves dedicated to free expression. In Musk’s Twitter, we may have that once again.
If Twitter under Elon Musk becomes a slightly more enlightened entity when it comes to free expression, that’s as much a positive benefit to the United States and her citizenry as if the corner drug dealers — under new management of course! — got a better batch of crack and fentanyl, with perhaps fewer side effects.
Twitter — as with social media in general — is terrible.
It’s terrible for you. It’s terrible for me. It’s terrible for this country.
Elon Musk may bring back the Babylon Bee and end the shadow banning of conservative Twitter stars, but — who cares? Musk’s improvement, such as it may be, should be held in its proper perspective. In the decade and a half since the rise of the big social-media platforms and their walled-garden version of the free Internet, it’s not evident at all that they have been a net improvement to the lives of individuals or the nation, bringing only distraction, shallowness, and rancor to a country in need of seriousness and depth.
Twitter is a commercial product, developed and distributed by very smart, very capable professional engineers, whose whole purpose is to destroy your ability to concentrate, distract your attention, steal your data, enslave you to the algorithm, and curate your communications, all while serving you ads and entrusting that your work days, evenings, and family time are invaded by the lowest-common-denominator drivel on the Internet.
Elon Musk can’t fix Twitter — because Twitter is Twitter, and Twitter is crack for your brain.
Last week, entirely unrelated to Musk’s purchase of the little blue bird, I deleted the Twitter app off my phone. In that week, not only have I read one and a half real-world paper-and-ink books (all in the time before bed that I would have been mindlessly scrolling the feed), but I’ve been less distracted at work and I’ve been blissfully unaware of the ridiculous non-events that are any given day’s drama and turmoil on that hell-hole of a website.
It’s a free country. I don’t propose banning social-media platforms (except for minors — I’m definitely open to that) or using government power to put them out of business. You can keep using Twitter if you want.
But we all know it’s terrible for us. We all know that we should stop using it. We all know that life would be richer if it had never been invented.
Elon Musk, if he were truly the enlightened, eccentric billionaire that he thinks he is, would shut Twitter down.