In fascinated horror, the world is watching Elon Musk destroy Twitter like a spoilt brat banging a shiny new toy against the wall. Would such wilful damage to any other major digital brand, even Microsoft, cause global alarm? Probably not, because they all have alternatives—even Microsoft, the leading operating system maker since the MSDOS era.
But Twitter is unique in social media for the speed with which interest groups can rally on it, just using hashtags. It’s the fastest messaging system for the public in extreme situations, from natural disasters and war to the sudden shortage of oxygen during the pandemic. If a tremor is felt in Delhi, which is on a fault line, it’s on Twitter well before the official announcement—which also appears on Twitter. If a tropical storm is headed for the Coromandel coast, you learn when it makes landfall on Twitter.
Wonder what the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were reported mostly by ‘embedded’ journalists, whose sources were safely in uniform, would have looked like if the public had access to locals on Twitter. During Desert Storm in 1991, the round-the-clock broadcasts by Peter Arnett on CNN were the world’s only source of independent information. And since only hotels had a dish antenna at the time, Dhirubhai Ambani’s Observer of Business and Politics installed a ‘CNN Monitoring Team’ there, whose reports filled the front page and bumped up circulation. Arnett made CNN, a channel out of Atlanta, a global brand, though his broadcasts did not pay the bills—that honour went to Ted Turner’s canny real estate investments in the Midwest.
But imagine if there was Twitter at the time, giving voice to the really independent observers—the Iraqis on the ground. Arnett, who reported mostly from a hotel, would have been an also-ran.
Traditional media realised very early that Facebook is a nice place for sharing your great-aunt’s birthday pictures, but Twitter is on their turf. Intelligently, instead of fighting it, they embraced the medium. And the platform, whose slogan read ‘People on Twitter are the first to know’, obliged by introducing the blue tick of authenticity.
Now, Elon Musk wants to sell the blue tick for $8 a month. That’s a bit like the education mafia in Bihar in the Nineties, which used to sell impressive-looking college degrees for cash.
ALSO READ | Twitter facing the blues under Elon Musk
Musk, being a businessman rather than a fly-by-night operator, is offering a subscription, not a one-time sale, but the certification is of no value because it is purchased, not earned. It won’t pay for a fraction of Twitter’s operating cost, either. But Twitter was originally the medium of the underdog, and they are using the scheme subversively. Eli Lilly’s share price took a hit when an impostor highlighted the obvious—that it has been price-gouging on insulin.
In the beginning, Twitter was exactly the opposite of Musk’s vision. It was the networking and outreach medium of choice for marginalised groups and suppressed opinions, and it accelerated the spread of the Arab Spring across nations. Soon, it was adopted by every interest group that shouts from the sidelines of high-minded but ineffective conclaves like COP27, which is now in progress. Climate activists were early adopters, along with the Occupy movement, whose ideas about wealth and equity, formalised in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, are radically different from what’s taught in undergraduate economics classrooms. Minorities made it their amplifier. In India, that means Dalits, who are actually the majority but are marginalised.
Everyone who treads a path that diverges from the mainstream makes their home on Twitter, preferring it to other social media. With respect to India, voices of interest range from satellite imagery analysts who give the lie to the government’s rhetoric on the border issue with China—they have pictures of Chinese villages and highways being built right in the zone—to the economist Kaushik Basu, who points out embarrassing realities about the economic situation, and invites long doomscrolls of vituperation from lynch mobs.
The mob is the majoritarian reaction to the rise of the marginalised, the IT cell is its semi-formal incarnation, and it has turned Twitter into a cesspool. Writing on the ongoing Twitter meltdown in the New York Times, the paper’s former New Delhi hand Lydia Polgreen notes an important point that is strangely not obvious in New York. While US opinion closely tracks America and China, the terminal points on the free speech spectrum, the countries to actually watch are democracies where speech and privacy laws remain works in progress, like India and Brazil. These are also the places where democracy seems to teeter forever on the brink of authoritarianism as governments push the envelope.
But in India, Twitter pushed back, moving courts against government rules that open the door to political censorship. It also asked, in court, why it must block the accounts of critics of the government if the traditional media is free to report on the farmers’ movement. It’s a sharp contrast to Facebook, which has gently stroked the government the right way.
There lies the rub. Musk has diverse business interests, which may cause him to pull back on the lawsuit. A free speech absolutist in the US, he may cause the platform to lose relevance in countries like India, where silence is being normalised. But in that silence, the footfalls of Mastodon are ever louder. The future could belong to such decentralised platforms where, like with Bitcoin, no one is in charge.
Pratik Kanjilal
Editor of The India Cable
(Tweets @pratik_k)