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During Dave Chappelle’s now infamous Netflix special last year, the comedian said something about Twitter that has stuck with me ever since. After explaining that he had been “dragged” — meaning insulted or denigrated — on the social media platform, he told the crowd: “I don’t give a fuck, because Twitter is not a real place.”
However one might feel about Chappelle (a physical attack on him on Tuesday suggests some feel quite strongly) it would be difficult to disagree with him on this point. Yet if one were to judge by the reaction, from some corners, to the news that Twitter is being bought by Elon Musk, one might think the tech billionaire was buying not just a real place but the world itself: one that we all have equal rights to, one that almost 8bn of us inhabit and one that we cannot — short of, say, colonising Mars — escape.
“One billionaire should not be able to turn the world upside down just because he plays by a different set of rules,” Democratic US senator Elizabeth Warren reportedly said in response to the news.
Twitter is not the world. And while it might be the obsession of adult journalists, puerile billionaires and toddlerish presidents, it is not much cared about by the majority, either.
It is often lumped together with mega social platforms such as Facebook or YouTube, but those sites have billions of active users around the world, while Twitter has just 229mn. Of those, most are lurkers: in the US, 97 per cent of the content is created by the top 25 per cent most active users, according to Pew Research, and users are also more male, more wealthy, more educated, and skew more to the left than the average citizen.
Musk, for his part, has spoken no less hyperbolically about the importance of the deal than his detractors. “Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”, the world’s richest man said in a statement announcing the acquisition last week.
The allusion to a town square is one that is frequently drawn, by Musk and others, but it’s wrong. For one thing, most of us would never dream of speaking to one another in real life in the way we do on Twitter.
The platform’s only real USP is its network effect; if enough people left, it would lose that too. A new platform supported by those concerned by Musk’s “free speech absolutism” is unlikely to have to overcome the same hurdles that rightwing knock-offs like Parler and Gab faced at the hands of Big Tech.
If we are to understand the public sphere as a place where status is disregarded — as described by Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who developed the concept — Twitter fails at this too. Status is everything: blue checks and follower counts, not all of them acquired organically, amplify the voices of the Twitterati, while those of the vast majority are never heard. Even the top 25 per cent most active users only get one retweet from their average 65 tweets a month, according to Pew.
The truth is that Twitter is not the town square; it’s the theatre. What is said on the platform is not “The Discourse”; it’s a performance, in which everyone has carefully rehearsed their 280-character lines, is aware that they are being watched and is playing to their crowd. Performers jostle for the mic, which they are given via retweets or likes when they say something suitably outrageous or funny or consensus-pleasing. Audience members, in turn, can heckle and interact with the performers and are sometimes even given the mic themselves when someone prominent decides to retweet them. A kind of dystopian and frenzied open-mic night, if you like.
The reason Twitter’s most prolific users are so worried about its future is that they are loath to give up the profiles they have spent years establishing. They might call Twitter a “hellsite” because it’s trendy to say so, but really they don’t want to lose their profiles and status any more than actors want to lose their fame.
All if this is not to say that Twitter does not matter, or that it is not a platform that can have profound real-world effects; it does, and it is. But even $44bn does not buy the public square.
You are not, in fact, what you tweet. If this were Ancient Greece, Twitter would be closer to the Theatre of Dionysus — where audiences were often so rowdy that staff-bearers would have to patrol the aisles — than the agora, where ideas were exchanged along with goods.
So Twitter is the stage, in all its gaudy, over-the-top, exaggerated glory. And Musk, with his more than 90mn audience members, is surely the greatest showman of them all.
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