Twitter consequences; not just for little people

It’s been a week since Elon Musk, funded by a distasteful assortment of backers, bought Twitter. In no particular order, some thoughts on what it means for various groups.

Employees
Predictably, swaths of US employees have been sacked without notice or compensation, in contravention of Californian law. Many of them were sacked soon before share ownership rewards were to deliver. All of them were ordered a week ago to work “24/7” on objectives the new management deemed urgent. For the several hundred at-risk or sacked employees in the UK and Ireland, there are legal protections which may be harder to ignore. But breaking labour law is at worst subject to fines, so simply a cost benefit operation for firms who can break the law with impunity. (Following a UK ferry operator sacking all its ship workers and immediately employing agency staff earlier this year, there is a growing case for strategic and profitable law-breaking on this scale to be criminalised to create a genuine disincentive. I don’t see the next Labour government having the backbone to do it, however.)

The US employees will find themselves out on the street with no health insurance. That’s catastrophic, and stop-gap insurance cover is prohibitively expensive. I availed of it myself over a decade ago, and it was more than a thousand dollars a month – not the kind of money you have lying around when you’ve just been sacked. Many senior Twitter managers resigned before they were sacked, and the mass lay-offs were clearly in the post, so many employees – the ones with the sense not to work 24/7 to keep a job they were likely to lose, anyway – will have taken steps to stay in contact with former colleagues once they’re locked out of their work messaging channels. The levels of chaos and dysfunction inside Twitter right now can only be imagined. Relatively few workers are unionised, and in these situations many people think they can keep their jobs by screwing their co-workers or just ignoring abuse, so those who remain will be in an increasingly toxic situation. It can be fifty-fifty as to whether the lucky ones are those who got sacked or walked early on.

I’ve been through a narcissist takeover, so my heart goes out to Twitter’s current and former workers. It’s very tough to be sacked not because you did anything wrong, but because your face doesn’t fit (or some xenophobic shit like you have the wrong passport). When you’ve worked for one of these organisations that demand your heart and soul and all your waking hours, and get canned for no reason, it’s brutal. It’s also tough to see how some colleagues act. I cut a deal where I was a dead man walking for a few months so I could avoid being legally required leave the country by midnight of the day I was sacked, and one person in a tiny office suddenly found me invisible. Awkward. I did not become visible again until I was gainfully employed and ran into them a couple of years later, when they were effusively friendly. Ugh.

On top of the financial pain and medical catastrophe that many ex-Twitter employees and their households will be facing, there’s the post-burnout comedown from a demanding employer, the months of anxiety as the takeover was on and then off again, and the final trauma of the last week or so. There’s also losing the teams they were part of and the purpose they felt they were working to achieve. As Musk torches everything Twitter was trying to do to improve the global political shitshow it’s at the heart of, sacked employees must also witness the destruction of any possibility for change. The disbanding of teams that have tried everything on content moderation and come up with hard-won if imperfect practical knowledge is a loss for them, but also for us. The destruction of firing the whole team working on algorithmic transparency and choice, for example, is a harm, too. Nobody thinks new Twitter wants any real agency or choice in the hands of users.

I hope the ex-Twitter workers find new ways and places to apply what they’ve learnt on the planetary-level hard problems of ad-monetised fascism. And also, perhaps, that some of them take from this the insight that there are no rewards for loyalty to employers, no long game you can play in someone else’s playpen, and the extreme urgency of using whatever position you have to push as far and as hard as you can, because no one is coming to save any of us.

Backers
People who understand finance better than I do can speculate about whether the deal’s backers will make their money back. They don’t deserve to, as their ‘due diligence’ was unmasked by the publication of Musk’s messages as little more than tech bro arse-licking. I’ll just say that it’s clear that the banks involved don’t expect to keep their shirts, can’t sell the debt to clients amidst the very public shitshow, and at best will try to offload the debt next year when the dust settles. I have no idea what dust settling means in this context. In contrast to his other privately held, publicly subsidised companies, Musk’s psychological fragility and vast Dunning Krueger deficit are now playing out in public. It will only get harder to convince potential buyers of the debt that Musk knows what he’s doing.

I’m increasingly concerned that state investment fund backers – specifically Saudi Arabia and Qatar – will use their leverage and access for nefarious political purposes. Two Twitter employees infamously used their access to spy on Saudi activists in the past couple of years, and passed the information to the kingdom’s ruler. I gave Twitter the benefit of the doubt and assumed they were infiltrators. None of us should do so again. Already, content on the platform has been manipulated to suppress information about Twitter’s labour practices, and users have had their accounts torched for jokingly mimicking Musk. The platform’s content and users will continue to be manipulated to further the ends and ego of its owner. We should also assume that there is now no bright line between the interests and wishes of its financial backers and the content and moderation policies of the company itself. Access by backers to user-data cannot be ruled out, whatever the likely denials. Activists using the platform are now at significant risk of the exposure of their identities and private correspondence to the authoritarian backers of Musk’s deal. The moral and legal boundaries that Twitter was governed by before can no longer be assumed to rule its conduct.

Related, the significant financial role of Binance, the crypto-currency platform, will also have consequences, not all of them as obvious as the constant stream of crypto-related spam on the platform. Bright lines and clear boundaries are going away, and I would not be surprised to see Binance using its stake to push content supporting the financial regulatory recognition it craves.

Advertisers
Advertisers are pulling back from the platform, at least for now. General Motors and other US blue chip firms have paused advertising on it, and the collective organisation of advertisers has taken note of the resignation of their key contact at Twitter. The immediate cause is the huge influx of emboldened Nazis on the day Musk took ownership, and his previous veiled promises to bring back Trump and other extreme right figures. That kind of toxicity is unattractive to brands. I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude on this one. Musk has never faced consequences. The racist and profoundly misogynist culture and labour practices of his other companies are well-documented, and have had no impact. The SEC wobbled and ultimately failed to sanction him for share-price manipulation done in broad daylight. He has never faced a problem that could not be solved by asking friends for money. So it’s gratifying to see that consequences in the form of lost advertising revenue have suddenly materialised.

Advertisers don’t fuck around. They’ll extract their pound of flesh. However, I strongly suspect this is an opening stance which can change if they feel he can be brought to heel just a little. There is a level of abuse and Nazism on the site that advertisers can tolerate, especially if Musk’s risible claims of future tiered access and moderation can buy them off. Still, watching him try to square the circle of free speech and advertising revenue is fun. Far better and smarter people have failed. And watching him try out in realtime all the stupid ideas everyone else tried and discarded – because he is quite incapable of learning from others – further deflates the heroic genius bubble in full public view.

Advertisers will also continue to be turned off by Musk’s own tweeting. Saying you’ll fight toxic disinfo while actively spreading it (i.e. the Pelosi conspiracy theory Musk circulated earlier this week) is hard on credibility. Sure, the commercial success of the Murdoch organisation shows us advertisers will happily support far right content if it gives them access to a desirable demographic. But it’s worth going back to the immediate cause of Musk’s decision to buy Twitter – his pain at being publicly scolded by Twitter’s CEO for denigrating a company on whose board he sat. Musk cannot cope with rejection or slights to his intelligence. His ego simply cannot tolerate it and must always find another way to distract itself from pain or doubt. He’s not just driven by animal cunning to distract people from his business problems with outlandish tweets on, say, foreign policy. He needs to create perpetual new spectacles to distract himself from the possibility that he’s not as smart as he wants to believe he is. He seeks the attention and regard of the leaders of hostile countries. Anyway, I have no fucks to give about the psychological frailty of this man – except to observe how many billionaires’ fathers despise them. Rather, he will just keep on doing this stuff, and advertisers cannot and will not accept it. And he can’t buy them. Unlike every other thing Musk wants to absorb into his hierarchical stack because he can’t deal with uncertainty and rejection – a while back it was Glencore, FFS – advertisers cannot be bought and must be serviced. Forever. A novel idea. Consequences, so. Not just for
little people.

Which is why I also think he won’t last, and will burn Twitter down then throw it away, blaming others for everything that went wrong. Clearly, he and his backers will do severe damage in the meantime. At the very least, they’ll excise the vanishingly small amount of things that made Twitter useful and enjoyable. At worst, they will be directly responsible for the deaths of activists around the world, and the re-entry of fascists into the platform and into political office.

But.

Power-users
And it’s a very small but. There are now tens of thousands of journalists, policymakers, academics and various other thought-leader types who viscerally get what it is to be trapped inside a monopolistic tech platform, and for it to be costly and painful to leave. I’ve seen people who never thought about this stuff before plaintively ask ‘but what about interoperability?’ or say surely there’s some way to bring their followers with them elsewhere? A week ago, almost none of Twitter’s elite had ever thought about platform lock-in or federated social spaces or decentralisation. (Or about how the status symbol of the blue tick is also a lifeline and protection for people dealing with real jeopardy.) A bit like Musk himself, they seemed to think being on top – whatever that means – was something inherent to them, not something that could be taken away on a whim. As well as an exercise in humility and a lesson in how elite markers like blue ticks truly function, lots of real-life influential people now understand in their bones why platform concentration and monopoly is a terrible, terrible thing. It makes them subject to the whims of one rich man. It makes them and their communications and everyone in their networks vulnerable to exploitation and threats they probably thought were just for activist-types or far away people in oppressive, foreign lands. Consequences, not just for little people. But more importantly, an experience-based understanding that Internet infrastructure chokepoints are political, and the politics can really hurt.