The Week Twitter Became an Authoritarian Country

Twitter’s Descent Into a Virtual Failed State

Image Credit: Matt Novak on Twitter

It’s been a wild ride. Have you ever been on a rollercoaster of idiocy, reaching into the apex of idiocy, and then hurtling down into the abyss of stomach-churning moronitude? If you’ve been on Twitter recently, you have. As the story everyone now knows goes, a Dweeb Billionaire took it over, proceeded to run it into the ground, with everything from creepy fanaticism to comical mismanagement, and then, LOL, asked Twitter if he should quit. To which it replied with a resounding: Jesus, man, go already.

Funny? Sad? Weird? Creepy? All of the above, and more. What’s the moral of this incredibly bizarre story, even for this age? Well, there are many, but the simplest one goes like this. Evil Twitter is a tiny taste of what an authoritarian society’s like.

I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t say it trivially. I say it from experience, in fact. Let’s call the Reign of the Dweeb “Evil Twitter” for short.

(Now, I don’t mean that if you were on Twitter lately, well, consider yourself Ai Weiwei, a brave dissident. I don’t mean, emphatically, that the Stasi came knocking on your door, or that people were being put in gulags, or that the morality police would come along and beat you on the ankles. I mean that you got a tiny taste of what authoritarianism is like.)

Twitter was — for a time — a reasonably democratic space. That doesn’t mean “democracy” in the naive sense of voting, it just means that Twitter was the kind of institution that was at home in a liberal democracy. Sure, there were problems of abuse and hate and so forth, but the idea — and that matters — the idea was for people to be able to communicate and relate and share in relative peace and harmony, and there was to be a measure of justice, too, for serial transgressors. In other words, Twitter, despite all its flaws and mistakes, and there were many, was a reasonably good example of enacting democratic norms — those of freedom, equality, peace, consent, and so forth. And, even if you don’t want to go that far, at least that was its aim.

But then the Dweeb Billionaire came along, and something interesting happened. Not just dark and sinister — but actually interesting, to history’s eyes. This was probably the first authoritarian takeover of a democratic space online, at large scale. Sure, there have been forum wars and whatnot before — mostly between fringe communities. Twitter wasn’t a fringe community. It was a community that the entire world knew, and yes, the entire world — even desperately poor people in developing countries I talk to know full well what Twitter is.

So what happened was that this reasonably democratic space, this if not perfect example of an institution of liberal democracy, then at least a fairly decent example of something that was trying to live up to such norms and values, and that’s not easy, because, well, they take hard work — that democratic space was taken over.

Suddenly. Literally. One day, Twitter was run by an if not perfect set of people — and who’s perfect? — then at least those who were trying to put truth over lies, peace over violence, consent over aggression, tolerance over hate. It had many, many people literally dedicated to all that, and we can all argue over whether they were doing a “good enough” job, but the fact is that having people around trying to do that job made Twitter usable.

And then, suddenly — wham, just like that — all those people were gone. And in their place rose a black tide of all the old poisons of history — hate, bigotry, stupidity, lies, etcetera. Worse, these attitudes were spread by its new owner, legitimized, in a particularly cheesy way: “I’m not saying it’s true, but what if it is?” As a result, advertisers fled in droves, because by now, literal Neo-Nazis were having their accounts reinstated, and, well, if you’re just trying sell mom’s Cheerios, that’s probably not a good look to advertise next to.

Now. Understand what really happened. This democratic space was, like I said, suddenly taken over. But it wasn’t any average corporate takeover. This was about something totally different. Corporate takeovers? We all know what they’re about. Money. But if you were interested in money, well, LOL — would you really have sent advertisers fleeing for the hills literally in days? As ad agencies called up CMOs, desperately, panicking, and told them to yank everything, before some innocuous, well-meaning ad Johnny’s Cheerios were right above…a Neo-Nazi saying something horrific about Jews?

This wasn’t an economic takeover, really. It was a political one, done for explicitly political motives, and that’s what makes it weird, striking, and notable. It’d be like if, I don’t know, Ford got taken over to make MAGA-branded cars, replete with a golden Donald Trump figurine on the grille. When I put it that way, it’s absurd. But because the internet is still relatively new, while the political motive was noticed, it wasn’t quite really examined — the fact that taking over an institution for political reasons, to push your own political agenda, when that agenda is fundamentally anti-democratic is…authoritarian.