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It is a perfect marriage for an age of plutocracy: Twitter with its serious problems and Elon Musk, the embodiment of those problems. What happens when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it?
Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about COVID vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of dubious claims, whether putting out misleading financial information or calling the British diver who helped rescue trapped schoolboys in Thailand a "pedo guy."
Twitter has a racism problem. Time and again, it has failed to consequentially answer the pleas of users of color to address the bigotry and harassment that are endemic for them. Tesla, the carmaker that Musk runs, has its own racism problem, with many workers complaining to the press and California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing suing the company over an allegedly pervasive problem of racialized degradation. The agency recently described one of Tesla's plants as "a racially segregated workplace" rife with slurs as well as discrimination "in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion."
Twitter has a bullying and harassment problem, and the subtler but related challenge of bringing out the worst, not the best, in all of us. Musk is the incarnation of these problems, too. Though you might think that having more than $250 billion, according to Forbes, and wanting to solve the problems of Earth and space would fully occupy someone, he seems to have a compulsive need to belittle people and burp out his least-considered impulses and stoke bullying by his legions of admirers in a way that both reflects and shapes how Twitter is.
And so it's just perfect, absolutely fitting, that this guy, of all guys, could now own Twitter.
If you've been paying attention to how things work in our plutocratic society, this turn of events won't surprise you. The arsonists routinely cosplay as firefighters. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (né Facebook) was as responsible as any American for letting hate speech and disinformation run amok on his platforms in the run-up to the 2020 elections, only to donate — with his wife, Priscilla Chan — $300 million to help secure that election from the forces he had helped unleash. Google, having helped shred local news gathering around the country with its massive market power in online advertising, turned around and promised to donate $15 million to the Support Local News campaign. At one point, a member of the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma manufactured and promoted OxyContin and thus helped to spread the opioid epidemic, mused in leaked group chat messages I reviewed and published on my newsletter, The.Ink, about whether the company should "commit to starting a foundation and pledge $1 billion over the next 10 years to play a leading role in addressing the epidemic."