Attacking a hornet’s nest with a stick is generally considered a bad idea, but so is saying something unpleasant about Elon Musk, whose hordes of free speech-loving insects will do everything in their power to sting you into an agonizing silence.
Last week, I was bombarded with comments minutes after writing a column about why it might be time for decent people to leave Twitter/X. I was a communist mouthpiece from a country where things were “terrible.” Anonymous users (usually anonymous) said I had “micropenis anxiety” and was “yelling like a feminist at a free tampon rally.” At least that’s how it was translated. It may have been even worse in the original Lithuanian.
“What a gay guy,” scrawled one person whose profile picture showed him smoking a big cigar (no micropenis insecurities!). “What a faggot,” sneered another. “This is a horrible place for cowards like you.” I was a “tantrum throwing” bastard. Among my other reasons for hating the mask were that I was a loser, a Jew, a rubbish person, a Hampstead elitist, a typical leftist, subhuman filth.
My favourite message was from someone who, judging by their timeline, is a huge fan of Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, who privately messaged me with the advice: “You should get your testosterone tested. It looks like it’s low. I’m not kidding.”
So if you question Musk and his say-nothing ways, you’re a communist at best, and a sexually inept effeminate person at worst.
On top of that, a man who makes a living writing for the Telegraph accused me of saying I wanted to create another “smug left-wing utopia”. I wondered how a Telegraph reporter, like other debunkers and (presumably) bots, could so spectacularly miss the point.
Who on earth wants a complacent left-wing utopia? The joy of social media is being confronted with a range of points of view: arguments, challenges, coherent debate. My objections to the way Twitter/X is run (or not run) have nothing to do with politics; it’s an objection to the platform being used to incite hatred, if not actual violence, and perhaps more importantly, to undermine the sense that some things may be verifiable truths and some may not. This was once an issue for journalists at the Telegraph.
I believe these reactions are no coincidence. You may remember Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase from 2018: “Flood the zone with sh**.” Author Shawn Illing explained what he meant: If you saturate the media ecosystem with misinformation, you overwhelm anyone’s ability to correct it.
“We are facing a new form of propaganda not possible until the digital age,” he wrote in Vox, “and it works not by building consensus around a particular narrative but by confusing the landscape so that consensus cannot be reached.”
To understand why this matters, we need to go back to the basics of how everyone in a democratic society knows to be true: the system of institutions and norms that collectively anchor us to some form of reality and enable us to resolve our disagreements civilly.
The system was named by American author Jonathan Rauch and became the title of his excellent 2021 book, The Constructions of Knowledge.
Rauf lists science and scholarship, journalism, law, and government as four fields that strive to enable us (most people) to live in reality-based communities. This is the constitution of knowledge that has served liberal democracies well for over three centuries.
To escape that reality, we start by attacking the scientists, the lawyers, the journalists, and the governments of the “swamp,” or “blob.” And then we go even further.
Donald Trump, who made more than 30,000 false statements during his presidency, was deliberately creating a flood of lies. He was flooding the field, or, as Rauch puts it, “conspiracy bootstrapping” — saying, “This conspiracy theory might be true,” and spreading it. And he was hijacking attention, another classic technique.
Watch Musk closely, and you’ll see him doing the same thing, even though it’s hard not to.
“That [Trump’s] “They do outrageous things so that we can’t think about anything else,” Rauff said. “It’s a tactic that Hitler popularized in Mein Kampf. It doesn’t matter if they laugh at us, it matters that they can’t help but think about us. I think Trump is the greatest propaganda genius since Goebbels, and he’s better than Putin.”
Musk, along with Rupert Murdoch, are Trump’s biggest supporters. And Trump isn’t the only one. In his fanatic mission of absolute, unbridled free speech, this manchild has welcomed back onto his platform people he knows to be liars, fantasists, conspiracy theorists and deliberate racists.
At the same time, he’s taken the worst of the misinformation and eviscerated teams that tried to spread the best, even if they were incomplete. He’s literally flooding the zone with shit.
“Think of Twitter as a mini-model of civil wars and clashes of beliefs, like the terrible religious wars of Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. Humanity basically lived with it as the standard operating system until about 1700,” Rausch said before Musk disparaged Twitter’s sphere.
“Today, we tend to assume that if we leave people free to have fun, respectful, truth-seeking conversations. That’s completely wrong… In a completely unstructured environment like Twitter, where there are no guardrails, people don’t talk to each other.
“They flaunt their tribal loyalty, insult other tribes, feel superior, indulge in affirming prejudices, and gradually descend into tribal conflict.”
That’s exactly what the musk wasp did last week. QED.
It took centuries of conscious work to build a constitution of knowledge to, in Rauf’s words, “save ourselves.” Unrestricted social media has done the exact opposite and, as numerous studies have shown, has led us to a world in which we increasingly don’t know who or what to believe.
This is especially problematic in the UK, where so-called traditional media is least trusted, 15 percentage points lower than in Germany and Italy, and eight points lower than in the US. It is no coincidence that the most trusted media organisation, the BBC, is also the target of the most vicious smears. Destroy the BBC and the Murdoch-Musk world becomes more powerful.
If Twitter/X is shaping up to be the worst social media, Rauch compares it to Wikipedia, saying, “Because it was built on a constitution of knowledge. We have freedom of speech, but we also have a discipline of facts. You have to be right, to show your homework. There will be disagreements, but that, too, will be built by proven Wikipedia users. Wikipedia has shown that with the right incentives, you can transfer that truth-seeking environment to the online world.”
So I’m not going to get tested for testosterone. I’m not longing for a complacent left-wing utopia. I just want a space that at least aspires to be grounded in reality. Elon’s sphere is full of really crap. Time for a lifeboat.