An Ancient Challenge
When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, some of the first advice she sought was what was happening to the English pound.
Her father Henry VIII had got up to some financial shenanigans. In order to improve revenues to the crown, he had debased the currency, literally, by allowing up to 40% of base metals to be included along with silver in the coinage.
What happened was, in retrospect, not terribly surprising. Merchants horded pure coins to use in international transactions, and had all but left her realm. Centuries later, his observation that “good and bad coin cannot circulate together” became known as Gresham’s Law after the financier Sir Thomas Gresham.
Henry was not the first to seek to reverse this basic law of economics. The Greek playwright Aristophanes had observed it back in the fifth century BC, as had advisors to the Yuan Dynasty, the Talmud, the Sunni scholar Ibn Taymiyyah and generations of Venetian and Dutch merchants.
Mo' Users, Mo' Problems
Whatever remarkable abilities Elon Musk may have, one cannot accuse him of being an historian. With his pending acquisition of Twitter, it sounds like he may be about to make the same mistake.
Since its quiet founding in 2006, Twitter has gone on a remarkable journey.
In its early years, when monthly new users could be counted in the thousands, the microblogging platform was a novel and thrilling venue for interacting with celebrities (your author had unexpected and thrilling exchanges with the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Ricky Gervais and Dave Matthews).
As the room got crowded, however, it became a monster. For journalists and sociologists it acquired value as a hitherto-impossible window into the Zeitgeist. All one needed to do to find out what people thought of Obama’s latest speech or Queen Bey’s latest outfit was to search on a hashtag. Indeed, it was a Twitter user who invented the hashtag.
As it became really crowded, however—particularly with the rise of bots designed to hype product releases and political candidates, not to mention a new generation of trolls whose only purpose was to hurt—it wasn’t fun anymore. Millions of early users tuned out. Its utility as a marketing platform faded. And the stock behaved accordingly, hitting a peak months after its 2013 IPO that it would not see again for the better part of a decade—even after being adopted as the preferred method of communication by the 45th president of the United States.
The last became a particular headache for the company. After trumpeting its desire to “let the tweets flow” and become “the free speech wing of the free speech party”, Twitter’s management woke up to the fact that certain forms of speech opened it to potential legal liability—incitements to violence and child pornography—as well as being, well, wrong. The Trump years saw the platform develop rules of the road that now number several pages—and in the wake of the Capitol riot of Jan 6, 2021, it even barred its most notorious user.
Enter the Superfan
After becoming one of its top users—with some 84 million followers, and with engagement rates estimated to be worth over $3 billion each year to his companies—one might think Musk would leave well enough alone.
Alas, as we’ve learned in recent weeks, he seems to believe the rules have become a problem in themselves. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy,” he declared in his statement announcing the deal. “Twitter is the town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Taken in isolation, it’s hard to argue with either point. It’s the implications for Twitter that may be disastrous.
The American Civil Liberties Union has spent much of its history defending terrible people, from Holocaust Deniers to Klansmen. Why? Because the speech that tends to get challenged and limited by a society is the speech that threatens to cause wider harm—like yelling fire in a crowded theatre, or calling for violence against an identifiable group.
It’s not entirely clear what kind of speech Silicon Valley actually thinks needs freeing. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said things like “I believe in giving people a voice”, and then fallen into silence when that voice is being used to coordinate a genocide in Southeast Asia.
With the rise of platforms like Parler and (almost) Truth Social, the answer has become clear. The only speech at risk in the US today, perhaps even the Western World more broadly, is not scrutiny of politicians’ platforms or dark dealings by a free press. It’s hate speech—and indeed any speech that seeks to actively distorted a country’s politics in order to hurt it (as Russia has long done in Ukraine, with some success).
Reality Bites
Here’s the thing, Elon. You can allow destructive speech to be free on Twitter if you want. But it won’t simply co-exist with constructive speech, any more than base metals could simply co exist in 16th century coinage.
As the American Psychiatric Association and others have noted, public stress levels shot up dramatically during the Trump presidency—even if you weren’t among one of the minorities the national conversation began to target.
And how do people deal with stress? Many rise to the bait, seek to argue with the haters, only to discover that they are unpersuadable (either of personal conviction or because they actualy a bot).
The road more taken is to tune out—as Twitter has already discovered.
The bad drives out the good.
That rule has held true for centuries. It has confounded and grounded leaders with more power than you, Mr Musk.
Try to change it if you will. But be prepared to become owner of a much smaller platform than you’re buying. Indeed, if Twitter tries to become Parler, it won’t be long before another enterprising soul decides to create a micro-blogging platform for those who don’t want to cause harm, and hearkens back to Twitter's roots.
Call it “Funner”.