Elon Musk Buying Twitter Reveals Why Journalism is Giving Up on Free Speech
Elon Musk announced today he’s buying Twitter (or attempting to anyway). While anything Elon certainly makes for juicy headlines, what really stands out is that the issue has emerged as a crucible for free speech.
The battle lines on this issue have been drawn. Twitter sparrows like me are all for flinging the gates open and letting the birds shriek. But what’s really novel here (and in quite a shocking way) is that media blue-checks, seasoned journalists among them, have taken the striking position that speech must be limited. What this reveals is that journalism and Twitter are consciously uncoupling. The question is why?
The romance between Twitter and journalism runs deep. It’s a heart-warming story of platform meets content, a tale of technocratic love at first site. It goes a bit like this: Around 2012 or 2013, as Twitter began to gain traction, journalists quickly realized that they had a direct line to audiences. This brought precious attention to their work and, in certain cases, a new kind of fame.
But, as we’ve been told by countless breathy feature stories, there was also a deeper appeal: journalists could break news in real time—and (joy upon joy) without the interference of pesky editors. This was incredibly important for reporters working in crisis areas or war zones, where the idea of sipping a latte and pondering participles is not an option.
Though it was largely early-tech mythology, there was some truth to this. I experienced the phenomenon firsthand in 2009 when, locked down in a 24/7 curfew during an attempted coup d’etat in Honduras, I was able to use a spotty internet connection to get the word out in 140-character snippets about what was taking place. As recently as last week, I did the same while caught in a terror attack in Tel Aviv.
Twitter didn’t just seem like a new way to spread journalism but a new kind of journalism altogether. It was short, quick-tapped, and as merciless and un-self-conscious as the unfolding events that are often its subject.
For its part, Twitter benefited to an even greater degree than journalism as it found itself flooded with the platform’s lifeblood—a churn of timely content rife with controversy. News would emerge as the renewable energy source of the Twitter zeitgeist; grit for the giant conversation mill. Without a sluice of breaking news about terrorism, elections, TERFS, trans swimmers, Putin, and (of course) Joe Rogan, Twitter would more resemble a placid lake than the torrent of ideological whitewater it is.
Seeing the mutual benefit, content and platform decided to make it official. Twitter hired a head of news; and journalism inaugurated legions of new social media beat reporters and social content editors.
It was all quite rosy and cosy, cute as a hearth-side rug. But in the last few months, we’ve seen cracks forming in the sacred union. With the leak of an internal memo by Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, encouraging the paper’s reporters to “meaningfully reduce” how much time they’re on Twitter, we know this about much more than the two merely “taking some time apart.”
The given reason for the breakup is the one implied by the Baquet Memo: Twitter causes and exacerbates infighting and discontent. New York Times reporters viciously dunking on each other is—to use a Twitterism—not a good look. This is something Baquet spoke to when he explicitly forbade Times staff from “subtweeting,” or calling out each other’s past tweets for criticism or ridicule.
While that seems like a reasonable motivation, the reality is that nothing about Twitter has ever been reasonable—and yet that never stopped the Times (or any news organization) from embracing the platform with reckless abandon. It’s not that Twitter changed (though Musk’s intervention certainly didn’t help in that regard). Rather, journalism changed. And it changed big.
One of the core values of the American press is freedom of speech. It is, perhaps, the core value. When Thomas Jefferson reflected that he would rather have a newspaper’s without government than government without newspapers, he was speaking to the essential tension between government and journalism, between truth and power. To be free, that is to properly be the kind of news media essential to a healthy democracy, meant being free from government control or interference.
As I’ve recently written, government encroachment onto media’s turf is no longer a serious concern precisely because government and media are now so incestuously intertwined their boundaries have blurred. A sitting press secretary is hired by a major network and most of the media simply gives the secretary a heart welcome. The media falsely debunks an origin theory of the pandemic using messaging created by the government’s very own science establishment. A tech platform censors a newspaper in a way that benefits a favored political candidate and the press lines up not to fight but to enforce the embargo.
As serious as this is, there is a larger force at play. For many (though certainly not all), news outlets, shaping, controlling and sometimes forging the narrative is what matters most. This is not something individual journalists do. The vast majority of rank and file reporters work hard to fulfill the ideals of their profession (often at great cost to themselves and their families). Rather, it’s the ownership class of media, increasingly a handful of giant corporations, which serves extra-curricular agendas, most of them connected to their holding companies’ stock prices.
But in an environment where ideological war is fought over basic facts, market share takes on a whole different dimension. On the battlefield where reality is determined, narrative—the ability to make your team’s political or ideological story determinative of actual reality—is what matters most.
This is what explains the media’s conspicuous (and quite recently acquired) suspicion of the very concept on which a democratic press is founded: free speech. We’ve seen this suspicion with the New York Times’ bizarre criticism of live audio app Clubhouse as empowering “unfettered conversations.” We’ve seen it in a recent Washington Post oped directly expressing skepticism about the validity of the idea of free speech, as it intersects with Elon Musk. And of course we’re seeing it now that Musk is trying to acquire Twitter.
Free speech is a direct challenge to narrative control. And this is exactly why it makes the media uncomfortable. The profusion of new technologies and communications modalities that have arisen over the past few years make free speech (free public speech) not just possible but unavoidable. But you cannot control the narrative when there is no single narrative to control; too many twittering sparrows drowns out the eagle’s elegant cries.
Journalism is consciously uncoupling from Twitter not because the relationship became stormy or stale but because Twitter has been seeing other people. Lots of them. In fact, despite the best efforts of its current management, it is probably the most intellectually promiscuous venture in history, a polyamory of the opinion space, dialogue as bacchanal.
On the far other hand, for all its “edgy” content, the news media is inherently conservative. This is true not just concerning how it likes to express ideas but of the narrow band of ideas that are allowed to be expressed with its walled garden. So the media, to its dismay, is back on the dating sites seeking a steady, sturdy, longterm someone with whom it can get its toes sandy of a Sunday morn.
Meanwhile, Twitter is the place the kids (albeit, mostly middle aged kids) go to throw things. Media has had enough of it all. But Twitter—meaning, the energy of “unfettered conversation,” the wild spirit of speech—Twitter is just getting started.
write someting on twitter attempt to use mass reporting to curtail free speach. as the "mass reporting" is used by motivated connected groups using another platform like "whatsapp" to block anyone not in line with their narrative. this is used mostly by those, who can be called "woke liberals" and "leftists"-self styled gate keepers of unprotected.
Wow, you deserve more views, excellent piece.