What's it going to take to get our leaders off Twitter?

Elon Musk will stoke violence in the US, says Marcy Wheeler. He'd clearly back another Trump coup. So what's the hold-up?

Elon Musk—the guy who needs to pollute your newsfeed with every one of his inane, bigoted thoughts—can’t help but be obvious.

It’s obvious he still backs Jair Bolsonaro’s 2022 attempted self-coup attempt in Brazil, so much so that he’s willing to have Twitter shut down in the country (but not so much so that he’s willing to risk his actual Starlink business). It’s obvious doesn’t regret helping to inflame riots in the UK and Ireland. And it’s obvious that he wants you to watch the Nazi whom Tucker Carlson interviewed this week in a video posted exclusively on Elon’s website, which has become a Trump campaign website.

It’s obvious. Elon wants his cake. And he wants to eat it, too.

And by “cake,” I mean your brain.

There was a time when adults could pretend they didn’t know what Elon was up to, and that time was before he outed himself as a union buster who at least tolerated racism at his factories and tried to impregnate just about any woman in his employ.

It wasn’t in December of 2022, when the New York Times published this:

Unless the lack of simplicity came from deciding whether he’s a MAGA conservative or a fascist or whether there’s any difference worth noting.

In a new Ball of Thread bonus Patreon episode, Marcy Wheeler makes the almost promise above that Elon will try to stoke violence in the US.

It could be violence like we’ve seen in the UK and Ireland, where the far right uses some tragedy as an excuse to riot and target any non-white person. Or it could be the sort of violence we saw in the US on January 6th or following Bolsonaro’s loss in 2023.

We can’t say what it will be about, but we know he will try.

In fact, violence is likely to be part or all of MAGA’s inevitable October Surprise since they seem to be recognizing that their ability to manufacture fake scandals about Democratic candidates has been disrupted by America waking up and discovering we have one spry presidential candidate whom people actually like.

As she always does, Marcy also makes an excellent point that I haven’t heard anywhere else—the sort of point that makes me ambivalent about having any members-only episodes because everyone needs to listen to every word she says—about how America’s laws on speech differ from the rest of the world.

She notes the standards for defamation and incitement are much lower in many other countries because they don’t have a First Amendment.

Elon has concocted one (or many) of the world’s worst cons by getting everyone to say he’s a “free-speech absolutist.” This is how framing works. It’s hard to overcome a label you hear over and over. And it’s complete bullshit. Here are over a dozen examples that show he’s an enemy of free expression. As I’ve long said, he uses “free speech” like Donald Trump uses “law and order,” not as a principle but as a cudgel.

He’ll use America’s freedom against us until he can’t anymore—by attacking democracy and truth every day and almost certainly by directly inciting violence here.

So why are we helping him?

There are so many reasons that people are still on Twitter. They range from what I’d call decent, like “community,” “fighting the good fight,” or “using it to raise money for downballot races (guilty),” to just feeling stuck there by sunk costs. The reality is that many of us have spent more than a decade using that app and our umbilical cord to news and loose connections with the world.

I don’t want to debate the personal aspects of this because they distract from the systemic problem. They also ignore how the algorithm and site structure increasingly reflect Elon’s obvious bent toward electing Donald Trump, disrupting democracy, and inciting hatred of migrants and immigrants. Stewing in that kind of propaganda affects your brain and the discourse while degrading reality. That’s by design.

You can go ahead and use the site. I beg you to go Twitter Last if you can.

But no one should be purposely sending people to Twitter now, in the lead-up to this presidential election, as he promises to stoke more coups, more riots, more hate.

We can’t expect individuals to lead this charge.

But you know who we should expect to lead us? Leaders.

That’s the excellent point of this piece from EUobserved:

The European Commission also started legal proceedings against X in July over misleading and illegal content, in a process that could see Musk fined hundreds of millions of euros.

But aside from the grand issues of how to regulate social media without stymying free speech or privacy, EU leaders could do something a lot simpler and closer to home for the sake of public mental health - just switch to any other less sleazy platform instead.

If elected officials, candidates, and prominent activists switched to BlueSky, publications would follow. There, they would see a chronological platform that’s better than Twitter (especially when used with feeds and Deck.Blue), a platform that actually serves up links to followers who actually click on them.

We’ve seen in Brazil that a whole country can make an orderly shift to a new microblogging platform and feel pretty great about it.

A mass Twitter migration wouldn’t fix everything.

It wouldn’t destroy Twitter as a business; Elon has already done that and doesn’t care.

It certainly wouldn’t fix the horrendous fact that taxpayers depend on this aspiring fascist for numerous services involving the defense of the United States. But it would make the statement to him and the world that we know exactly what he’s up to.

And it might save some lives.