Editorial Issue 2: Social Media Platforms Are a Headache to Own- Who Wants to Buy Them and Does it Matter?
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With social media companies being incredibly expensive purchases and often riddled with controversies, why would anyone want to buy them in the first place?
Given their importance in providing platforms for discussion and debate, it should come as no surprise that there are often strong ideological motives at play—whether it’s Kanye West buying Parler, Elon Musk buying Twitter, or Donald Trump creating Truth Social. Elon Musk has often stated a commitment to free speech being the driving force in his decision to buy Twitter. A self-described “free speech absolutist,” he promises to replatform controversial figures that had previously been banned for breaching the social media company’s terms and conditions, although he insists that a “clear process” for this replatforming will need to be put in place first. Musk’s vision of Twitter is for it to become a “common digital town square” where free discussion and debate are paramount.
The concern over free speech is not an absurd one. Twitter executives have banned more and more users from the platform in recent times, including the former President of the United States, and one man who threatened to kill a dead mosquito.
Musk is just one of the handful of men looking to rule a social media platform. Elsewhere, disgraced rapper Kanye West has offered to buy Parler for an undisclosed sum, and Donald Trump founded his own platform Truth Social just earlier this year. It seems the only thing bigger than these men’s pockets are their egos.
So, why does this matter?
Social media platforms have quickly replaced cable and print news as people’s go-to source of information. In 2019, 52% of all American adults got news regularly on Facebook, 26% on Youtube, and 17% on Twitter.
Social media isn’t only a tool for news-reporting, it serves as a soapbox for politicians and a platform where actual policy decisions are made. In 2017, former President Donald Trump announced his decision on Twitter to ban transgender people from serving in the military. His then Secretary of Defense was on vacation at the time, and it was reported that his announcement left the White House and the Pentagon “scrambling.”
Elsewhere, a Ugandan general and son of the country’s president tweeted that he would capture neighboring Kenya’s capital city Nairobi in two weeks. The incident sparked a diplomatic crisis and set off a chain of meetings between Kenyan and Ugandan government officials.
Dr. Andrew Wilson, a professor at UCL and Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations whose areas of expertise includes political technology and mis- and disinformation campaigns commented that “policy from the hip can be ill considered, not going through traditional channels, not going through traditional checks, and not going through policy viability checks.”
The platform has been increasingly used by politically connected people—academics, journalists, and those working for British MPs and American members of Congress—as a place to debate and discuss policy proposals. Considering that such a high rate of adoption exists in influential circles, the content that appears on platforms such as Twitter may have an even greater impact on policy-making than many think.
However, the importance of its role in policy-making is often undercut by rampant mis- and disinformation campaigns. Take the role Russian propaganda has played in justifying the war in Ukraine, or the role misinformation has played in recent elections for example. A 2018 study conducted by MIT found that false news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. “It’s not equal competition,” Professor Wilson said, “people prefer the fake, but of course they prefer a certain type of fake. And there’s a big literature now about confirmation bias, echo chambers, and radicalization within those echo chambers.” When used for this purpose, social media has the capacity to undermine the democratic process.
Social media platforms have also exacerbated genocides in Myanmar and Ethiopia. The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission said that Facebook played a “determining role” in the genocides against Rohingya people in Myanmar. Facebook itself admitted they “weren’t doing enough to help prevent [their] platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” A 2017 U.N. report identified more than 150 highly influential Facebook accounts, pages, and groups that routinely spread content that was hateful towards Muslims and the Rohingya people.
The situation in Ethiopia is much more complicated, but many believe it is tantamount to genocide. Whistle-blower Frances Haugen described Facebook’s engagement-based ranking system in Ethiopia as “literally fanning ethnic violence.” Professor Wilson added “the stuff that really spreads is what pushes all these buttons which we now know are identity politics, emotion, and outbidding to the more radical voices within these groups.” Meta is not oblivious to what's happening on its platform: internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that employees had warned that armed groups in Ethiopia used Facebook to incite violence against ethnic minorities. Documents they reviewed showed that the company’s response was “in many instances… inadequate or nothing at all.” Clearly, social media’s ability to break down social cohesion can have disastrous effects, and with new leadership comes new, often lax, approaches towards content moderation, the lack of which has already contributed to misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric.
Kanye’s acquisition of Parler, a social media app that had previously been described as “Twitter for conservatives,” came after the rapper-turned-social-commentator was banned from numerous social media platforms for posting anti-semitic threats and peddling anti-semitic conspiracies. His move to buy the controversial app is widely seen as a reaction to his ostracism from other platforms as well as a pivotal part of his transition into politics which has seen him run a presidential campaign and weigh in on a number of hot-button issues from abortion to slavery.
Trump’s story is eerily similar. The former President was banned on various social media platforms, principally for his incitement of the violence that occurred during the January 6th Capitol riots. Truth Social is intended to be an uncensored social media, the kind of bastion of free speech that Parler and Musk’s Twitter aspired to be, accommodating the kind of conspiratorial incitements to violence and threats that got Trump into hot-water in the first place.
Ultimately, despite these social media companies sharing the common populist narrative of unrestricted free speech, they all seem to miss the mark. Musk has accepted that moderation will still be necessary for a Muskian Twitter, seemingly watering down his earlier commitment to free-speech absolutism. Parler has had to crack down on users that have tried to “test the limits of free-speech” by posting images of gore, pornography, and other sometimes patently illegal obscenities, and Truth Social has been accused of censoring dissenting opinions.
Although the ideological basis for the motivation to buy a social media company is obvious, one might still then question how deeply rooted these ideological motivations really are. Of course, a particularly cynical perspective might identify money and profit as the root causes. After all, social media companies are potentially multi-billion dollar enterprises in a theoretically incredibly competitive market. It would make no business sense for multi-millionaires like Trump, Kanye, and the richest man in the world Elon Musk to spend such vast sums on unprofitable acquisitions. The truth is, however, that although Musk has slashed executive positions in order to make Twitter more profitable, social media companies are questionable investments at best. Since its advent in 2013, Twitter has only occasionally turned a profit. Parler, on the other hand, has had to rely on fundraising which although impressive, with the company raking in upwards of 50 million dollars, is unlikely to be a sustainable business approach as the companies the platform's popularity, and its ad revenue, falters. The outlook for Truth Social is even bleaker. Unsurprisingly, the Trump-led business has never generated revenue and may never do so.
If the ideological motivations are superficial and the monetary ones are insufficient, the question remains: what actually drives these kinds of people to buy social media companies? Well, the clue is precisely in the kinds of people involved. While Musk, Kanye, and Trump may seem like two unrelated businessmen and a further unrelated musician, they are or have at least become ‘personalities’ first and foremost. Their fame and popularity are no longer mere consequences of who they are, but rather essential parts of their identity. They all delight in creating and sharing controversial and attention-grabbing content, and they all hope to carve a space for themselves in a loose counterculture which has bunched together groups as far-removed as cryptocurrency aficionados and white supremacists in an all-encompassing “alt” space. What sets these three figures and other similar ‘personalities’ apart from the rabble is that they’re rich. They can afford to buy a social media platform to accommodate their extravagant personalities. Ultimately, buying a social media platform means not only putting yourself in the public eye but also controlling a part of the public space from which this eye peers. And anyone willing to do the latter and desiring to do the former is by nature a public persona, and more often than not, one that is extravagant and controversial. Ideology might be their chief public motivation, but it should really only be seen as an extension of their extravagant personality which is the real determinant.
If social media companies—these crucial spaces for public discourse—are destined to be bought by extravagant firebrands, should we be worried? The truth is that not much will or can change. Accounts might be banned or unbanned. Terms and conditions might change, as will corporate structures. But the nature of the internet is such that there will always be spaces in which people can disseminate whichever opinion they choose, and people will invariably be confined to their usual echo chambers. When Twitter ‘censored’ election conspiracists, they moved to Parler or Truth Social, and there are always deeper recesses of the internet to which people can escape when even these social networks can’t accommodate them: for every traditional social media, there are hundreds of chat boards on 4chan and forums on the “darkweb.”
Regardless of who owns these social media platforms, regulation will be the determining factor in how they are shaped. The internet is a relatively new and largely unregulated space. And while it might look like the Wild West, it isn’t bound to stay that way. The most obvious cases of government regulation are the many instances in which autocratic governments have cracked down on internet usage and content; take China’s Great Firewall or Turkey’s frequent banning of Youtube. But the “free and democratic” West isn’t absent of censorial policies and ambitions. For example, the EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market which was implemented in 2021 contains broad copyright provisions that threaten the re-use and parody of content. Of course, many object to the laissez-faire rationale and argue that more regulation is needed to ensure that big tech companies do not hold a monopoly over online content moderation. Ultimately, regardless of whichever side of the debate you find yourself on, the takeaway is clear: when it comes to the future of social media, and the internet in general, it matters not what extravagant multi-billionaires do, but how governments react.
Editorial Contributors: Aidan Dennehy, Alex McQuibban, Harvey Nriapia