Elon Musk’s Twitter Has Launched a Historic Attack on Free Speech That Could Change the Course of American History in the Near Term
Musk has a plot to transform America that’s more reminiscent of the supervillainry of a Marvel or DC film than a business plan. Last night this plan took a big step forward—and now America is at risk.
Note: The first two sections of this long Retro report are provided for free. To access the full report, sign up for a free 7-day trial of Retro at the link below.
Introduction: How Musk’s Plot Goes Well Beyond Politics
Some may wonder why this report appears on Retro rather than Proof. The reason is that what’s at issue in what happened on Twitter last night—Sunday, December 3, 2023—may superficially involve American politics but is part of a grander scheme that’s considerably more encompassing.
Elon Musk—as most American news-watchers will know by now—has developed a self-aggrandizing, overarching, Manifest Destiny-level metanarrative for each of the cynical business projects that made him rich. Tesla is not about taking false credit for others’ innovations, engaging in systematic labor violations, or building a variable-quality product that never has more than a few of the features originally promised and is never delivered on time, but rather saving humanity from the Apocalypse. SpaceX isn’t about gaining control over military operations worldwide or geopolitics broadly writ via the selective deployment of Starlink, making Musk and his work so essential to NASA and the Pentagon that he’s now broadly protected from DOJ investigations and SEC oversight, or proving that his manhood is bigger than Jeff Bezos’s or the only men (brutal autocrats such as those in Russia and India) he considers his equals, but saving humanity from the Apocalypse by making us a multi-planetary species in a way every scientist you talk to not employed by Mr. Musk says is unworkable and foolhardy.
Neuralink isn’t about extending Musk’s own consciousness beyond its natural life and his own intellectual capacities beyond their natural limits, paving the way for chosen friends and associates to become ubermensch, or outmaneuvering competitors in a hot field he came to so late he feels embarrassed about it—AI—but saving humanity from the Apocalypse by giving us a chance to remain dominant in the coming age of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The Boring Company isn’t about building a highly dangerous flamethrower that post-production was deliberately misclassified to evade customs regulations, embarrassing cities whose traffic patterns personally annoyed him in the past, or positioning himself as a master of not just space travel but every form of terrestrial travel, but rather saving humanity from the Apocalypse by easing the effects of overpopulation—and thereby convincing people (particularly Western whites) to have more babies. Twitter is not a place for him to make friends, be finally seen as “cool,” and be enveloped in a safe space for his bigotry, but rather a chance for him to save humanity to beating back a nonsensical concept of his own derivation—the so-called “woke mind virus”—which is simply a euphemism for ideas he disagrees with (as well as a ready, ex post justification for overpaying for Twitter by $25 billion).
To hear Musk tell it, everything he does is a heroic, knight-errant quest to save us all.
The more particulate, wholly concocted Muskovite metanarrative for buying Twitter goes something like this: people in America have started to engage in wrongthink en masse, with dangerous ideas spreading domestically like wildfire. Ideas like hostility toward Russia (where Musk wants to build Tesla factories) and hostility toward Saudi Arabia (which worked illegally in 2016 to elect a president from the Republican Party, which party Musk needs in power now to have free rein to do as he likes). Only Musk, backed by Saudi blood money and a virtually uncountable number of Russian bots, can bring Americans back to their senses by kettling Americans’ speech in ways no social media platform has tried before. And like every Orwellian far-right scheme of the last quarter-century, Musk has turned to the old Karl Rove playbook and tag-lined his plot precisely the opposite of what it is: an attempt to destroy free speech in America has thus become a valiant scheme to save it.
Sure, the facts on the ground already prove Musk a liar on this latter score—but it is also becoming harder and harder on Twitter for anyone to say so and be heard. Musk has been caught messing with the Twitter algorithm to punish people he dislikes; he has used broader amendments to the algorithm (like punishing any user who blocks other users at a time he’s encouraging far-right users to be edgelords who troll their political opponents mercilessly) to dampen progressive voices; and his awarding of a blue checkmark not to those who are experts or public figures in their fields (as was the case before his reign at Twitter) but only to those who pay him money has ensured, in conjunction with his new rule that blue-checked feeds must be atop every comment field, that only those who assent to his vision of digital discourse can have their words readily seen on his platform.
And then there’s “Community Notes”, a Twitter “feature” Musk pretends he created but—per usual for him—is merely a rebranding and PR overhaul of others’ hard work.
Under the prior executive cadre of Twitter—which Musk spent a full year seeking to libel and slander to the point that they would receive death threats and struggle to ever work again in Big Tech merely as a means of framing Twitter as now wholly his—what is now called Community Notes was “Birdwatch”, originally a minimally visible subpage where the most invested Twitter users could voluntarily provide feedback on posts they thought were spreading misinformation or disinformation. This feedback was, at Birdwatch’s origin, helpful but not explicitly mission-critical, as Twitter had human employees working on content moderation at the time. While Birdwatch and its corrections were public and the relatively small cadre of well-vetted editors inside the program experiencing an expansion of the program at the time Musk took over Twitter, the scale of Birdwatch’s public dimension was significantly smaller than what Musk envisioned and ultimately invoked (for instance, I never saw a Birdwatch correction that I can recall, and I’m a regular user of Twitter). Again, however, while Birdwatch surely had utility, it was neither deemed nor designed to be a replacement for conventional moderation protocols.
When Musk bought Twitter and set about making thousands and thousands of others suffer for his own foolish business decision, he—besides trying to destroy the lives and reputations of the platform’s former execs—recklessly fired thousands of loyal employees, stripped every hardworking expert and public figure who’d been providing high-quality content for Twitter for free for years or decades of the blue checkmarks they’d earned through their hard work and dedication to the platform, and brutalized all users of the platform by breaking, removing, or putting behind a paywall current or planned platform features (everything from the “tip jar” to a long-promised free “edit button”). It was all part of his campaign to visit pain on others instead of himself over a business decision he regretted instantly—indeed went to court to try to undo—and this campaign eventually involved making a renamed Birdwatch effectively the sole meaningful moderation mechanism at Twitter. This freed Musk from having to pay employees to do a task he well knew could (for now) only reliably be done by humans.
What Metamodernism Has to Do With Birdwatch Becoming Community Notes
When I say that the story this report details has nothing specifically to do with politics or the law and everything to do with how digital culture develops in this decade and the next, I’m speaking not of Elon Musk’s venality, instinct for self-preservation at all costs, and pathological deceit in both his business endeavors and his personal life, but a more expansive and more dangerous flaw in his worldview.
While in this particular instance the intersection of the Muskovite worldview and digital culture does relate to two high-profile figures in American culture generally and American political debate specifically—Musk himself and Joe Biden—it also involves the continued devolution of Twitter as a discursive environment, which devolution Retro has been charting (separate from all its political implications) by regularly publishing rankings of the best Twitter alternatives and including with these rankings many news stories related to what’s happening at Twitter and what’s happening at other social media platforms in response to what’s happening at Twitter.
The problem of misinformation and disinformation online—and, over the last year, at Twitter specifically—is fundamentally a “digital culture” issue by no means exclusive to political debate. Misinformation and disinformation suffuse every category Retro addresses: sports, visual art, literature, television programming, video gaming, and the rest of the sprawling entertainment milieu (everything from comics to music, obscure memes to contemporary cinema). The question of how today’s digital denizens handle misinformation and disinformation is a matter of sustained, spirited debate among critical theorists—with metamodernists (and as readers will know, Retro is the first U.S. substack with a dedicated section on Metamodernism) particularly focused on what truth is, how it is produced, and how it is undermined at this stage of the digital era.
Specifically, metamodernists have long been fascinated with how a surfeit (excess) of truth can lead to deceit. That’s right—as strange it sounds, the digital age allows us to access more truth than ever before as well as more deceit than ever before, and those who are savvy about how the internet works can pile so much truth atop a given event or situation that it ends up misleading readers.
Candidly, this is a significant concern for curatorial journalists like me. With national bestsellers like Proof of Collusion (2018), Proof of Conspiracy (2019), Proof of Corruption (2020), and the subscriber-only Substack-published Proof of Coup (2022), it was easy for readers overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of meticulously sourced facts in those four massive tomes (one of them a digital tome) to draw conclusions about what the books were indicating that the books didn’t actually intend. When we’re overwhelmed by information, we sometimes fill in gaps in our understanding with presumptions or prejudices rather than anything we’ve actually read or learned in the document we’re working with. That said, it’s in part the responsibility of a curatorial journalist to try to minimize this danger, and I’m certain that in writing the first bestselling works of curatorial journalism I at times failed in that duty (though I think far less frequently in the last two book in the tetralogy, by which time I had honed my craft beyond what it was in the first and most notably the globe-spanning, wildly complex second book).
All of which brings us to Community Notes—that is, Birdwatch—which Musk simply renamed, expanded, and then took credit for by pretending it had no predecessor or precedent (more or less what he’s done with Twitter writ large in ignoring the years of blue-check independent citizen journalism he destroyed, including literally by killing large parts of Twitter’s archive, following his purchase of the platform; he has since falsely claimed that his purchase of Twitter launched the era of citizen journalism on the internet and turned Twitter into a digital public square for the first time in its history though it had already been so, at the time he bought it, for well over a decade at least).
Musk’s “creation” of Community Notes was, from the start, a metamodern project of extremely dangerous character. Why? Because Musk is not a metamodernist and does not understand how to leverage metamodern tools for the public good. Rather, he’s a High Modernist of the Ayn Rand “Objectivist” school, which in simpler terms means that he believes that every single rich person rich is rich for a plausible and readily justified reason and that the rich have universally been gifted to the societies in which they live for the purpose of weaving metanarratives to lead their civilizations forward.
{Note: I say “forward,” here, but of course the history of business fraud is filled with men like Elon Musk who gain wealth, develop grand narratives about how and why they accrued that wealth, and then propound grand but false narratives in order to mislead and confuse the public and particularly their consumers—most notably those in the middle and working class.}
Metamodernism is temperamentally supportive of collaboration, palimpsestic truth-seeking, radical transparency, co-authorship, and systematized reframings, so at first blush Community Notes might have seemed to be that rare corporate product even a metamodernist could love. But in Musk’s hands, the idea behind Community Notes—that is, in actual fact, not in Musk’s mythologizing—was, from the jump, that Musk would outsource the extremely expensive human and automated moderation protocols previously used at Twitter, which require both well-paid employees and significant technological resources to work properly, onto the shoulders of his platform’s most ardent users (who in a cruel irony that immediately distinguished Community Notes from Birdwatch, would now be charged, for the first time, to be on Twitter). It was, and it remains, an example of the awesome power of grand-but-false narratives: Musk’s metanarrative about what free speech is and how he’s furthering it at Twitter not only has nothing to do with how the term has been understood and juridically adjudicated throughout American history, but has in fact been a mere cover for an unscrupulous businessman getting paying customers to also be his unpaid employees.
{Note: Free speech violations occur only when a government actor prohibits certain kinds of speech without offering an alternative time, place, and manner for that speech to be expressed. It is impossible for moderation on a private social media platform, when and as it is executed by a non-government actor, to be a free speech violation. This report therefore addresses the issue of “free speech” as it is (wrongly) understood by those who claim their First Amendment rights are under threat not by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the contemporary Republican Party, but by political progressives. It is over this sense of the term that, rather preposterously, domestic political debate in the United States is currently being waged—with significant implications for voter turnout in the 2024 presidential election but also for the development of social media platforms going forward—and for this reason it is this ill-informed and uncultured sense of the term we must wrestle with. As (mis)used by far-right demagogues, “free speech” and the rights accruing thereunder answer only the question of whether far-right demagogues and their apparently emotionally fragile supporters are able to say whatever they want wherever they want whenever they want without consequences or any burden on their speech or even their feelings whatsoever. It is in this sense that Musk himself represents the gravest threat to free speech in the United States, not just through Twitter but in the way of thinking he is spreading to users of all social media platforms. While juridically “free speech” has a well-established meaning that those on the political right in America increasingly seem to be broadly ignorant of, they are at least correct in presuming that even legal principles can have differential social constructions mismatched to their textbook definitions. It is certainly not true that free speech is whatever people think it is in everyday conversation, but where the rubber meets the road on social media platforms it is also not entirely unwise to proceed as if this is so. And in the political realm it is often just as necessary to address perception as reality—a particularly fraught maxim as America faces the possible loss of its hard-won democracy in November 2024.}
A microanalytical delineation of what Community Notes does is that it crowdsources corrections of inaccurate content on Twitter. Any proposed correction must receive a certain number of votes from users to appear publicly as a lengthy amendment to the original post that’s published without the foreknowledge or consent of the original poster. Musk says that his algorithm—known to lean wildly to the right (even more so than was already confirmed to be the case before he bought the company)—is able to ensure that the votes needed to make a given correction public come from across the political spectrum. But confirming this at any scale is an extremely arduous and time-consuming task that would likely only be suitable for dedicated researchers, placing it in the camp of “hypothetically discoverable but practically elusive data” that so many public statements Musk makes about his private businesses fall into when they’re not conclusively opaque from the jump (I note that even many of his statements about his public companies fall into one of these categories, at least at the time they are uttered—given how few of his promises about the Tesla Cybertruck, the Tesla Semi, or Tesla Supercharger Stations turned out to be true).
But the biggest issue with Elon Musk’s Community Notes, which has plagued it from its first appearance on Twitter as a rebranded Birdwatch, is that crowdsourced truth can oversaturate a mass communications instrument to the point that readers become misled. In simpler terms—trying here not to let my background as a former comms professor at University of New Hampshire get the best of my diction—the problem with Community Notes is not so much that the notes themselves include inaccurate information, but that (a) Twitter culture positions them as only being present when a post includes misinformation, disinformation or notably misleading information, but (b) they’re also preceded by a strange “[this is just] additional context” disclaimer that encourages Twitter users to (using this phrase as a verb now) “community note” any person whose words they disagree with. The end result is that Community Notes is increasingly deployed whenever a group of partisan Twitter users wants to forcibly inflect or amend a post from one of their political enemies and do so via the post itself.
While Twitter is a private company that has wide latitude to (mis)define free speech however it likes, in the sense of the phrase Elon Musk is working daily to popularize “free speech” on Twitter is dramatically infringed by the protocol Musk implemented.
Because “community notes” get appended to a tweet without the permission of the Twitter user, and because even when and as these notes feature accurate information they can be of such length and complexity that they dwarf the accurate information already stated by the original poster, they simultaneously (a) falsely imply that the original poster lied or misled in their post; (b) falsely imply that the new information added to the original post is somehow more valid or more important or more accurate than the information it was appended to; and (c) falsely give the impression that a large number of Twitter users were or are offended, concerned, or otherwise put out by the content now being amended via community note—when in fact that’s almost certainly untrue, and indeed many of the notes are of a bracingly partisan character and pushed behind the scenes by an ultra-narrow, self-selected swath of the Twitter user base.
In the pre-Musk era, disagreeing with someone on Twitter meant responding to their post with your own opinion on the matter under discussion. Or, alternately, you could quote-tweet any tweet you disagreed with and append your own gloss of the situation in a new tweet that would appear exclusively on your own feed. The idea of being able to amend tweets written by other people without their permission and also do so purely for the purpose of disagreeing with them politically was considered not just preposterous but—I dare say—would’ve been seen under Twitter’s prior leaders as a summary destruction of Twitter as a space for free expression.