What does Elon Musk think Twitter is?

Assessing Elon's big week

It can be hard to remember this, but in the early years of Twitter roughly 90 percent of accounts were celebrity “parody” accounts -- parody in the thinnest, most liability-denying sense of the term -- called things like “@WillFerralREAL” or “OFFICIAL Kat Williams” or “Official Ted (Real).” For the most part, real celebrities were not on Twitter, and these accounts, which were not affiliated at all with Will Ferrell or Kat Williams or Ted, the talking bear from the Seth MacFarlane movie Ted, were designed to meet the hopes and expectations of inattentive fans with plagiarized one-liners (or, worse, AIM away-message type platitudes) in order to amass an audience that could be exploited for money, say by selling tweets directly.

Archeological traces of this era still persist, like the unforgettable fact that the Twitter handle from which Donald Trump preferred to communicate as president and commander-in-chief was “@realDonaldTrump,” because when he joined Twitter in 2009 someone had already established a “parody account” at @donaldtrump, but the era of @WillFerralREAL is over. Real celebrities, or communications professionals in their employ, can now be found on the site tweeting “This. Is. Not. Normal.” under their own names; regular users can easily find the official account of their favorite comedian in order to vainly beg for help with medical bills in the replies; and former celebrity parodists now tweet their banalities from non-parodic “gradient accounts.” The feature that makes this great dance of tragedy and mediocrity possible is “verification”: The process through which Twitter assigns a special blue check-mark to accounts officially attached to prominent people and institutions.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Twitter is better, necessarily, now that fake celebrities tweeting “real pain for my sham friends” have been replaced with authenticated celebrities urging their followers to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but it seems worth remembering the age of @ThaRealKatWilliams, now that Elon Musk, newly installed as Twitter’s owner, plans to start charging a monthly fee for verification. Well-meaning but extremely boring activists and critics raised the alarm about the potential misinformation implications of pay-for-verification policies; venture capitalists and the reactionary meme accounts they’re trying to impress have cast the decision to make guaranteed authenticity a subscription product as a blow for egalitarianism. It’s not that I don’t think any of these groups are sincere in their beliefs about the deep importance of verification to Twitter’s structural integrity. But at the moment of the feature’s origin, Twitter’s main concerns were less “foreign influence campaigns” or “political misinformation” or “free speech” or whatever, and more “how can we get Tony LaRussa to stop suing us?”

The burning need in 2009 to help users differentiate between @EllenOFFICIAL and Ellen Degeneres has largely been forgotten because in the years between beloved rapper Kanye West saying he would never join Twitter over the fake Kanyes on the platform and controversial rapper Kanye West being suspended from Twitter for saying he would go “defcon 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” -- a period during which “verified accounts” have become an ordering principle across most social media platforms -- verification has become a strangely charged idea on Twitter, one of many subjects at the center of a partisan war between two broad camps of Twitter power users, an ongoing and generally pointless struggle between a deeply annoying SJW-Democrat-media confederation and an impossibly witless IDW-Republican-tech coalition that seems to be both the worst thing on the site and also the thing it is specifically designed to foment.

There are better and worse accounts of how and why verification became a front in this war; I recommend Katie Notopoulos’s account at Buzzfeed. I think the two “sides” are pretty neatly summed up in the following tweets, and not simply because one is hand-wringing from an earnest academic with a cartoon avatar and the other is preening bile from a tech Substacker with an NFT avatar:

Katie Mack @AstroKatie

The point of Twitter verification is that for certain individuals/organizations it’s useful to be able to verify their statements are coming from them. (This is why so many journalists/reporters are verified.) It’s supposed to help combat disinformation, not be a status symbol.

Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) @antoniogm

It's amusing to watch the very caste whose entire status rides on that little checkmark swearing up and down that they'd never be such losers as to pay for it. You're going to fork out for it (or your employer will). Who are you kidding? You'd pay more than $20 even. LMAO.

You might (not entirely fairly) sum up these two understandings of verification as something like:

1. Verification is a necessary and neutral means of countering misinformation.

2. Verification is a hotly desired status symbol that arbitrarily elevates connected elites above normal users

I’m not going to waste anyone’s time trying to adjudicate between these two views, because as I have suggested my understanding of verification is that it is chiefly a tool for making brands and famous people feel safe, like a Feliway spray for litigious celebrities, but also because I think these views are less empirically developed theories of verification than assumptions about what verification must be that derive from prior beliefs about the purpose and nature of social media, i.e.:

1. Verification is a necessary and neutral means of countering misinformation because social media is a public sphere where we come together to learn and deliberate.

2. Verification is a hotly desired status symbol that arbitrarily elevates connected elites above normal users because social media is a key arena for establishing and reproducing social hierarchies.

I’ve been thinking about this divide because, since Musk bought Twitter, most of his public statements have suggested he holds the first view of Twitter: It’s a “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” as he said in a statement to advertisers this week. But charging money for blue-badged check marks -- check marks that won’t even be nominally connected to a real “verification” process -- suggests a deeper understanding of Twitter as something much closer to the second view: a place to establish and enjoy your social dominance as a “prominent” person.

The truth is I can’t really tell what Musk thinks Twitter is -- if he actually does imagine it as a “common digital town square” dependent on transparency and authenticity, or if he agrees with the resentful Silicon Valley freaks he’s surrounded himself with that it’s a game of hierarchical social positioning, or if he thinks of it as both or either depending on the last person he talked to. Over the past week he hasn’t acted like a person with a real plan, let alone a clear concept or theory of balancing the tensions of an advertising-funded social-media platform. Instead he’s made impulsive and contradictory decisions, acted out for attention and approval, and attempted to appease varying intransigent groups of users before lashing out when praise wasn’t forthcoming, all the while complaining and posting vaguely resentful memes. He’s been acting, in other words, like a message-board moderator.

Longtime readers know that one of the running arguments of the Read Max newsletter is that social media platforms, and especially Twitter, are essentially overgrown message boards and web forums of the kind that defined the social experience of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s therefore vindicating of our theory to see Musk settle so quickly into the familiar social role of “forum mod,” a job that I particularly associate with personality types like Musk’s -- self-impressed, easily wounded, and above all extremely unfunny. I’m not the first person to point out that in terms of precedent, Elon’s week of management looks less like Mark Zuckerberg’s time at Facebook or either of Jack Dorsey’s stints at Twitter, and more like the reign of the late Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, who founded and moderated the infamous and influential forum SomethingAwful.

Kyanka, by the way, famously spent years tinkering with various ways to make money to support the forum -- settling around a one-time charge of $10 to use the forum, plus extra charges for access to archives and to remove ads. The charges (which had to paid again if you got banned from the site) didn’t make Kyanka a millionaire by any stretch, but the money kept the site alive and allowed him to pursue his passion, which was being the center of attention and seeking the approval of people on the forum who hated him -- in a word, posting.

Elon will not make enough money to sustain Twitter operations simply by charging for premium accounts. But Something Awful -- and to a more stable and profitable extent, Reddit -- are proof that on forums, dedicated posters are more than happy to pay for certain kinds of accounts, or for dumb little flair icons to add to their avatars, and that money can offset revenue from fickle advertisers who aren’t sure they want to be associated with something as debased as a web forum, especially not one with a volatile narcissist at the helm. Maybe Elon doesn’t think of Twitter as a “digital town square” that needs authentication procedures, or on the other hand as an arena for tech executives to square off against dastardly journalists on an even footing, but as, basically, a popular message board, with himself as its main-character moderator.