Trolls and toxicity: what Musk's Twitter will look like

Opinion

An image of Elon Musk on a smartphone screen with the Twitter logo in the background.

Image: STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Image: STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images

By Dr Luke Munn
UQ Digital Cultures & Societies Research Fellow

After completing his acquisition of Twitter on 27 October, Elon Musk wasted no time. The chief financial officer and general counsel were escorted out by security. Accounts banned for 'minor' infractions would be reviewed and unbanned. And massive job cuts were foreshadowed.

On 4 November, the axe fell, and more than half of Twitter’s workforce was gone. Days later, more cuts came as Musk laid off more than 5,000 contractors. Others were unceremoniously dumped after criticising Musk on social media or even privately. Musk’s grand claims of being a 'free-speech absolutist', it seemed, only applied to the people he favoured.

What impact have these seismic shifts had on the Twitter landscape? While the 'cult of the founder' in startup culture often overemphasises the single leader, in this case we can see how that power becomes systemic. Musk’s layoffs have gutted Twitter’s technical and content moderation staff, and the resulting chaos led to the heads of security, compliance, and privacy all quitting. Of course, there are certainly immediate implications here for security and functionality. Critics worry that the platform will be hacked (or go down altogether), data will be leaked, and accounts will be impersonated.

But more worrying than these technical problems are the negative social impacts. Musk’s layoffs and free-speech-inspired overhauls have effectively removed the key safeguards from this product. Content moderation teams, governance strategies, hate-speech policies – these were important if often overlooked infrastructures that mitigated some of the ‘bird’ site’s worst tendencies. Those guardrails are now gone.

An illustration of the Elon Musk’s Twitter account displayed on the screen of an iPhone in front of the homepage of the Twitter website.

Image: Chesnot/Getty Images

Image: Chesnot/Getty Images

So, what will Musk’s brave new Twitter look like, and what does social media without guardrails look like? It’s important to note that social media companies are companies – they have incentives to attract customers, build their products, and accumulate capital. To realise these objectives, tech companies have often turned to ‘engagement’ as their primary metric: what gets the most views, the most clicks, the most time? The problem is that engagement tends to privilege controversial, polarising, and outrage-inducing content. False tweets, for example, travel much further and faster than true ones. Edgy content, deftly toeing the acceptable/unacceptable line, performs well. As my own work demonstrates, social media is often angry by design. Left unchecked, toxicity, misinformation, and bigotry get baked into the platform’s operating logic and then amplified at scale.

Alongside these general incentives, it’s also important to highlight Musk’s invocation of that powerful term: ‘free speech’. In principle, free speech is a wonderful idea; in practice, it’s often a smokescreen deployed by those who wish to continue abusing others. Indeed, radical right platforms like Gab and Parler explicitly position themselves as ‘free-speech social media’ and platforms for the people. Claiming to be 'censored' for 'speaking the truth' is a strategy in which the abuser becomes the victim – the one who is ‘cancelled’ for not being ‘politically correct’.

To see through this tactic, we need a firm grasp of race, class, and gender. Who has historically been privileged, who has been marginalised, and what advantages does this provide to particular groups and people? Free speech is free for some and not for others –and this means it can be deployed to keep power in the hands of the powerful.

It’s no surprise, then, when we see Musk conferring directly with notorious right-wing trolls. And it's no surprise that we saw a massive spike in hate speech hours after his acquisition. These tendencies increase the danger of the platform to women, people of colour, and LGBTQIA+ folk – who already face a higher likelihood of harassment and attacks online.

It’s too early to say whether the platform will become an extremist ghetto, as some have suggested. But as controversial figures become unbanned and advertisers jump ship, it's undeniable that the climate of Twitter has shifted perceptibly. The site may not become a hate haven so much as a trash fire: a heap of digital detritus ranging from misinformation and conspiracy theories to broken links, outrageous claims, and unsavoury advertising.

An illustration of Elon Musk and the Twitter logo.

Image: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Image: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images

As the ship goes down, users look for lifeboats. Some have shifted back to Instagram or even Facebook, ‘legacy’ platforms that have retained moderation and offer a more comfortable (if banal) environment. Others have opted for newcomers. Post, a platform promising ‘civil conversations’, was hastily launched two weeks ago as Twitter’s wreckage became clear. Yet the site is very much in beta: users are waitlisted and basic functionality like DMs and a native app are still missing.

By far the largest lifeboat has been Mastodon, whose userbase has surged from a few hundred thousand to 2 million in the wake of Musk’s acquisition. This open-source software allows people to set up servers with microblogging features. In some ways, then, Mastodon offers a similar experience to Twitter, with ‘toots’ posted to a timeline. But Mastodon is also different and notably more fragmented. Posts are only seen by your followers. And each server is its own world with its own interests, codes of conduct, and moderators – a decentralised infrastructure known as the ‘fediverse’.

For some, this learning curve is manageable; for others, it proves too frustrating. Reports from those who settle in oscillate between praise, frustration, and relief of being off the ‘bird’ site. Of course, Mastodon has its own issues. Scholars have pointed to the platform’s dominant whiteness and its inhospitality to marginal users. Decentralisation by itself doesn’t erase hierarchies of power: who has money for servers, who has administrative privileges, and who gets to speak? Whether Mastodon can navigate these tensions and prove to be more equitable and inclusive – both as an organisation and a constellation of communities – remains to be seen.

In the end, Twitter’s rapid descent highlights the fragility of our current platforms. How have we reached a situation where a single owner can destroy the social capacities and daily communication of millions of people? While Twitter was far from perfect, it provided a global finger on the pulse to journalists, a space for activism for certain communities at certain moments, and therapy in the form of gossip, memes, and LOLs for others. These spaces have now been threatened or shuttered altogether.

Perhaps we need to socialise these platforms as public infrastructure. Perhaps we need alternative forms of organisation to reclaim the internet. Whatever the solution, Musk’s disastrous takeover makes one thing clear: the ‘accepted’ state of affairs for our critical communication platforms is unacceptable. 

About the author

Dr Luke Munn is a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures & Societies at UQ. His wide-ranging work has been featured in esteemed journals like New Media & Society as well as popular forums like The Guardian. He has written five books: Unmaking the Algorithm, Logic of Feeling, Automation is a Myth, Countering the Cloud (forthcoming), and Technical Territories (forthcoming). His work combines diverse digital methods with critical analysis drawing on media, race, and cultural studies.