Spite over everything
Musk purchased Twitter in large part because he wanted to be in a position to harm many of its core users — journalists, liberals, Democrats, trans people, and other marginalized communities. Twitter is a flawed but nonetheless invaluable place where these groups have come together to talk, to strategize, to fundraise, to organize, and to hold the powerful accountable.
Musk is a billionaire transphobe who’s been convicted of union-busting and has been sued for racially segregating his factory floor. He’s also pathologically online. (He met his ex-partner, the musician Grimes, on Twitter.) Now that he owns Twitter, it’s also his chance to own the libs who have criticized and dared to mock him. He’s in a position to break their communities and drive them from online spaces where they’ve built networks and formed friendships.
Musk doesn’t want to destroy Twitter in the sense of rendering it a smoking ruin with a URL that leads to the abyss. But he does want to destroy Twitter to spite his enemies. Loosely defined, that means he wants to destroy it for everyone who questions the righteousness of a world ruled by white male billionaire tech bros.
There are numerous examples of how Musk’s Twitter fiasco is linked to his right, and far right, ideological commitments. Musk made his first moves towards acquiring control over Twitter in April, motivated in part by Twitter’s content moderation. In particular, he was angered by its decision to ban former President Donald Trump after he used the platform in organizing his violent coup attempt.
Musk has also been obsessed with revamping Twitter’s verification system — explicitly in the name of punishing and disciplining those with verified checkmarks.
Right-wing Twitter trolls have long used “blue checkmarks” as an insult to suggest that journalists, and especially left-wing journalists, are part of an out-of-touch, elite hive mind which wields unearned and unchecked (as it were) power. This confused analysis culminated in a evidence-free conspiracy theory that people were buying blue check marks for $20,000. (See this irate user making that claim, for example.)
Musk has bought into this framing. One of his first acts as owner was to promise to do away with the checkmark verification system in order to bring “power to the people”— that is, to the right-wing trolls who Musk sees as his friends and as the populist volk. Musk said that his Twitter Blue service would sell the verification badge for $8/month, and that he would remove “corrupt” legacy blue checks.
Musk’s treatment of Twitter employees is also ideologically motivated. Again, the right has long been enraged at Twitter for its (halting, inadequate, but still) efforts to moderate hate speech on the site. Even Twitter’s former billionaire CEO Jack Dorsey — who, like most billionaires, isn’t a fan of the left — accused his own workers of being too liberal.
Dorsey, though, was circumspect about trying to appear neutral even as Twitter’s algorithm was designed to boost right-wing politicians and content. Musk is more ignorant, more rabid, and significantly higher on his own supply. He’s always treated his employees at his other companies with contempt and suspicion; Tesla, for example, fired employees for staying home to avoid Covid even after assuring them it would not.
Musk’s animosity towards Twitter workers is even more egregious; before acquiring the company he said — like many a far right Twitter troll — that Twitter employees were lazy leftists who needed to be culled. The massive layoffs, then, weren’t just a cost-cutting measure; they were a punishment. So is Musk’s arbitrary, unmanageable, sweeping revocation of Twitter’s work-from-anywhere policy, forcing employees to spend 40 hours onsite a week, even though many of them live nowhere near an office.
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Originally Posted by otnavuskire
