Over the weekend, two enormously wealthy, fully-grown white men continued to toy with our attention spans, with Twitter CEO Elon Musk requesting that the two turn their monetary dick-measuring contest into a physical one. Also over the weekend, as signups for Meta-owned app Threads soared, Twitter traffic fell. I speak for basically everyone when I say that no one has any interest in an actual dick-measuring contest between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, I would like to propose that their bandied-about cagematch concept be a fight to the death.
It’s not like the duo is simply annoying, though they’re both impressively unlikeable, as Twitter user @JUNlPER wrote yesterday over the stupid “dick” argument: “It’s crazy how Elon Musk is the only person in the entire world that can make Zuckerberg seem anything close to human and normal.” The issue is the disproportionate amount of power these two wield, and how poorly they do so.
Let’s remind ourselves of the contenders here: Musk is a guy who can’t keep a wife to save his life, and whose own daughter won’t speak to him, as of last year. He’s famous for launching a line of electric vehicles perhaps best known for killing people while in self-driving mode. He’s driven the usability of Twitter into the ground while making it a pay-to-play zone for right-wingers and reply guys. Zuckerberg created a website for rating his Harvard classmates’ attractiveness, which he turned into Facebook, which then helped torpedo the 2016 election as he basically stood by and watched. (Zuckerberg apologized in 2018.) He’s also now fighting with the government over profiting off the data of minors.
I don’t think the U.S. is on the verge of doing anything to structurally hew in these man-children or their pursestrings, busy as they are scapegoating TikTok for the data collection practices that U.S. tech companies made industry standard. Bad enough that their song and dance is damaging Twitter, a platform that, for better or worse, helped launch the careers of countless journalists from marginalized backgrounds (myself included). I’m empathetic to the argument from those like CNN media analyst David Zurawik that focusing on a cagematch means we’re not talking about “far more important questions, such as whether their social media properties should be regulated by some force bigger than them, like the government.” I agree with the importance of the latter, so respectfully: I contain multitudes, I’m gonna do both.
It seems redundant at this point to list off all the ways Musk has damaged Twitter, so I’m going to focus on our latest platform du jour, which has only existed publicly in its current form for a few days. Summed up by Motherboard’s Janus Rose, Threads’ sales pitch is that it is “a text-based social network that is not actively falling apart, created by a monopolistic tech company known for privacy abuses and run by the second worst guy on earth.”
Rose and others argue that Meta’s attempted platform-vacuuming – not so different from when they launched Instagram Stories as a competitor to Snapchat – is only possible because Musk made Twitter so incredibly radioactive. (These guys wouldn’t know an original idea if it literally smacked them in the heads. Typical tech bros, “inventing” shit that already exists then “innovating” by making it worse in a way no one asked for.) “Even by these extremely low standards,” writes Rose, “[Threads] is not good.”
So forget for a second whether or not it’s the new Twitter; let’s remember who’s in the driver’s seat. We have Zuck’s Meta to thank for platforming QAnon, and contributing to the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. It’s no wonder that Instagram head Adam Mosseri claims Threads won’t “do anything to encourage” content that includes politics or hard news, citing the “scrutiny, negativity [or] integrity risks” that come along with that content. Essentially, they’re saying, content moderation is hard, so we’re just going to not algorithmically promote content that might require a higher level of moderation. Existing reporting on Facebook’s content moderation strategy paints a horror show, describing its workers reviewing an endless stream of disturbing materials for inadequate wages and benefits, underscoring why it’s essentially a task the platform would rather sidestep.
As platform users tend to understand intrinsically, you ignore or undermine the political at your own peril; it will find its way with or without your supervision. A review of the first few days of Threads in the Guardian, expanding on the company’s hopes for a less angry Twitter, claimed, “The racism, antisemitism, transphobia and general abuse that is prevalent on Twitter is just nowhere near as visible.” Yet research from Media Matters For America found over the weekend that Threads is already home to extremists like Moms for Liberty and white nationalists like Richard Spencer. Did you know there’s another presidential election next year? No risk here, haha!!! (Screams internally in journalist.)
And while Meta touts the direct connection between Threads and Instagram accounts as a benefit, the data privacy concerns are myriad, from potentially opening up users to unknowingly risking criminalization for discussing abortion on the platform, to how the structure of the platforms enables harassment of trans people whose old photos are being unearthed on Threads via their connected Meta accounts. As you’ve probably read, you can’t delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram.
Let’s say the company does get those pesky right-wing actors under control, and create the sort of frictionless, capital-oriented scrolling that has converted Instagram into a digital shopping mall. Behind Threads’ algorithmically obscuring anything unpleasant with “inane celebrity and influencer content and stolen Twitter memes,” writes Forbes senior contributor Paul Tassi, “is another megacorp trying to directly control what you see and don’t, all in the ultimate service of building something that’s advertiser friendly.”
Meta properties, Threads included, are cannibalizing your app usage to sell off to the highest bidder. How does that benefit you, the user? Twitter, on the other hand… I mean, if you’ve used it recently, you already know why it sucks more than it ever has. In the end, both companies could simply go the way of MySpace and Friendster, but it wouldn’t change how much money Zuck and Musk are making off us along the way — or how little accountability there is for either of them.
So let them fight, who cares. These two “adults” couldn’t think of anything better to do with their wealth and power than engaging in some classic masculinity posturing, having a cockfight over blue checks and followers; they deserve what they get, whether that’s some much-needed government oversight or a punch in the nose.
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