Last Updated on 01/03/2023 by てんしょく飯
Twitter is increasingly disrupted by the acquisition by Elon Musk
The biggest social media news of 2022 will be the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has been problematic from the start. In April, he disclosed that he had purchased 9% of Twitter stock, but he was not satisfied with the board position he was initially offered. As a result, Twitter accepted Musk’s offer to buy the company for $54.20 per share, or about $44 billion in total (about 6.4 trillion yen). The reason for the purchase at a price higher than the stock price at the time was to “apply free speech on the (Twitter) platform.
Twitter resolved to accept the offer on April 25, but Musk then put the acquisition on hold temporarily because “5% of Twitter accounts are fake accounts or spam,” publicly complained about Twitter, and refused to proceed with the already agreed-upon acquisition. They did not want to proceed with the acquisition process that had already been agreed upon. So Twitter sued the State of Delaware, and Musk nearly got into a muddled legal battle, countersuing Twitter.
But predicting that he would not win as the October trial approached, Musk decided to complete the acquisition as originally offered, taking ownership of Twitter on October 28 and immediately firing half of its key management and employees, including CEO Parag Agrawal. Employees who objected to those words and actions of Musk were also fired.
There was a sense of unease among users even before Musk took over Twitter, and as expected, he has tweeted out anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theories based on disinformation from the right in the wake of the Twitter vote that brought former President Trump back to Twitter and the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband (now vanished). Theory tweeted (now erased).
Twitter Blue, which Musk introduced as a quick way to recoup his $44 billion expense, also frustrated users. For a monthly fee of $7.99, users could obtain a blue certification badge, which led to a number of incidents in which users who obtained the badge pretended to be official users.
For example, an account pretending to be an official account of Nintendo of America had Mario give the middle finger. In response to this confusion, 50 of the top 100 companies that had been using Twitter for advertising have stopped advertising. Musk also reinstated a number of right-leaning accounts that had been frozen for spreading disinformation on the grounds of “freedom of speech,” while freezing the accounts of journalists who were critical of him one after another.
Because of this series of events, many people around me began discussing where to move from Twitter around November of 2022. Mastodon is popular among my Japanese friends and acquaintances, and Post, which just started its invitation-only beta registration in November, is popular among my American friends and acquaintances, but Twitter has banned posting links and handles to specific social media sites, including Mastodon (a few days later, the ban was (The ban was lifted a few days later, but there may be more twists and turns in the future.)
And with Tesla’s stock price down to almost half the price it was at when he proposed the Twitter purchase in mid-November, Musk decided to step down as CEO following the results of a Twitter poll he conducted himself. As long as he is the owner, however, it will not make much difference who becomes CEO.
Anger Addiction” and “Yes, Debate” Make Twitter the Worst Place to be
As someone who started Twitter in January 2009 and has gotten to know many people and cultivated fruitful relationships through this social media platform, I am sad to see what Twitter has become. However, it is also true that I had been gradually distancing myself from Twitter even before the acquisition by Musk. Let me explain a little about how I got there.
In the early days of Twitter, I used to say, “Social media is just a tool. I wrote “Loose, Free, and Meaningful – Stress-Free Twitter Techniques” (Asahi Press), published 12 years ago in October 2010, based on this belief. However, I did not believe in a perfect “flower garden.” I was already aware of problems such as “harassment,” “personally offensive replies,” “self-aggrandizement,” and “Twitter addiction (dependency),” and wrote about them as advice.
It was about five years later that I actually experienced the eeriness of the targets of such attacks. I started introducing Western books on racism, misogyny, sexual violence, LGBTQ+, etc. on my blog “Western Book Fan Club,” started writing about social issues in the U.S. in a serial column in Cakes, and as a natural progression, started making such comments on Twitter. Then I began to attract a different kind of following than I had in my early days, and at the same time, I began to receive attacks from strangers that I never imagined I would receive.
I realized that not only I but many others were experiencing this, so I wrote a column on how to respond to personality attacks (included in my book “America is Always Dreaming”) and wrote in the flowchart I created at that time, “Twitter is not a medium suitable for fruitful dialogue. I made it a fixed tweet with the comment, “If you are aggressive, have a different basis of understanding, are unexplainable, or persistent, I will block you without responding to you to keep your TL organized.
It was the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which the disinformation spread on Facebook and Twitter had a major impact, that led me to question the early notion that “bad things happen through social media because of the people who use them.”
Later, while translating Rebecca Solnit’s essays “Innocent Cynics” and “Facing the Outrage” in her book “Call Them by Their True Names,” I realized that “this is exactly what is happening in social media! This is it! I thought, “This is exactly what is happening on social media!
For example, when an argument occurs on Twitter and the other person stops replying, it is because “there is no point in having a dialogue with this person, let’s stop because it’s a waste of time. There are people who are happy to say, “Yes, I broke the argument. Behind this idea of “debunking” is what Solnit calls “cynicism. The “urge to push nuance and complexity into a clear two-dimensional argument,” as she calls it, is pervasive in social media and has the power to destroy in an instant what has been built up by people who have worked steadily for years to improve society.
What “Facing the Rage” also addresses is the difficulty of dealing with “anger. Solnit writes, “In social media, the latest mistake can be made by the person who said it, or by the person who said it.
Social media pays only cursory attention to the facts in order to feel good about shaking a righteous fist at the person who said or did the latest wrong.
The angriest people are often the most gullible and will happily jump on anything that fans the flames of anger without scrutiny.
Content that provokes anger is more likely to succeed and be remembered.
When we observe people who are exploding with followers on Twitter from Solnit’s perspective, we find that “cynicism” and “anger” are major inducements. I have also noticed people who seem to make a hobby of finding tweets of people who are speaking out on issues and creating controversy through quoted retweets with criticism (RTs with comments), day after day.
When I myself raise my voice about the inequalities occurring in society, I am happy when I receive many supportive retweets, as if I have been recognized. However, thanks to Solnit, I have become aware of the fact that this is a “dangerous feeling” that I am addicted to and have the desire to reproduce.
Facebook doesn’t care if there’s a massacre, but starts fussing when it loses users
My further thinking about social media has been influenced by daily discussions with my husband (David Meerman Scott), who has written an early business book on marketing with social media. One of them is about the dangers of Facebook’s algorithm.
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds And Our World, released in September 2022, is a non-fiction book about how social media has reconnected our consciousness and social circuits. The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds And Our World, a nonfiction book that shocked even those of us who thought we knew the dangers of algorithms.
Written by Pulitzer Prize nominated New York Times journalist Max Fisher, who did extensive reporting, the book completely blew away my early belief that bad things happen through social media because of the people who use them.
While heartwarming and amusing posts on social media attract sympathy, it is the posts that stir negative emotions of “anger” that motivate users to stay and spread for longer periods of time than that. Among these, people are strongly attracted to “moral outrage.
Facebook knows this and has created an algorithm to make such content appear more often. When people click on and read news or information that causes outrage, the algorithm will show them more and more of the same kind of content. Many of them are disinformation and conspiracy theories, but Facebook does not eliminate them. Users click through to read more extreme content, and they get more and more bogged down. People who incite anger with extreme comments can become popular, and some will go after them. And then they connect only with those who share the same beliefs, grow outraged, and unite. That is how it works.
I knew about the mechanism itself, but I did not know that Facebook played a major role in the riots and genocide that took place in Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
Facebook and YouTube were used in Myanmar by Wirathu, a charismatic Buddhist monk who spreads hate against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Wirathu travels throughout Myanmar spreading hate while building a growing social media following.
In 2014, he falsely posted that two Muslim coffee shop owners raped a Buddhist woman. Willas also published the names of the owners and the store, spreading conspiracy theories that Muslims were trying to start an uprising against Buddhists and calling on the government to attack Muslims and mosques as a preemptive strike to prevent it.
Wirath’s post went viral, and Buddhists who believed it started a riot attacking their Muslim neighbors. As the riots spread, Myanmar government officials tried to contact Facebook through the consulting firm Deloitte, but Facebook did not even respond to either the government or Deloitte. So the government blocked Facebook in Mandalay, where the riots were taking place, thereby calming the riots. What is appalling is that Facebook started contacting the government the very next day. And it was not about the riots. The question was, “Why did you block Facebook?” The inquiry was, “Why did you block Facebook?
The case in Sri Lanka is similar to that in Myanmar. Muslim brothers who saved money by doing manual labor abroad opened a restaurant in a small village called Ampara in Sri Lanka.
Rumors circulated on Facebook that the police had confiscated 23,000 pills that made men sterile, which were in the possession of a Muslim pharmacist living in Ampara, and that night, Sinhalese customers of the majority ethnic group began to make a fuss about something in the curry. The brothers, who speak Tamil, a minority language, could not understand the Sinhalese question and said, “We don’t know,” “Yes. Did we put it in?” They replied, “I don’t understand. Taking this as a confession, the Sinhalese beat him, destroyed his store, and set fire to a nearby mosque.
In the past, the rioting would have stopped there, but the Muslim, who did not understand the language, said, “Yes. Did we let you in?” The video spread quickly through Facebook groups, and the message “Kill all Muslims, don’t make exceptions for infants. Hundreds of comments calling for genocide were posted.
Local human rights groups investigated all of them and demanded a response from Facebook, but their appeals were completely ignored. The Sri Lankan government, fearing riots, also demanded a response, but Facebook did nothing. As tensions rose, a Sinhalese truck driver who had been seriously injured in a traffic dispute with Muslims died, and rumors spread from Facebook to WhatsApp, Twitter, and YouTube that this was a Muslim plot to eliminate Sinhalese people. The riots lasted for three days, during which numerous Muslims were violently attacked, burned in their homes, and killed in riots caused by the anger and hatred that grew there.
The Sri Lankan government finally blocked Facebook, and Facebook sent a policy director only after zero usage in Sri Lanka. As in the case of Myanmar, Facebook is able to handle the killing of scores of people with impunity, but panics when the number of users declines.
In the value system of Silicon Valley, represented by Facebook (Meta), the algorithm that brings in money is justice. Even if innocent people are raped and slaughtered as a result. And even those of us who are outraged by this have the same mentality of treating the entrepreneurs who made their wealth through social media, who had a hand in the slaughter, as “successes” and heroes.
It was 2022 when I got fed up with those numerous phenomena.
To make my garden alone a “field of flowers and fruits”.
I have also been influenced by the fact that I have seen several people I know who have become so immersed in social media that their battle there has become like an addiction. This has led me to drastically reduce the amount of time I spend on Twitter in particular. In Japan, few people come into contact with news articles via Facebook, and as an American resident, I only read English-language news on the websites of major newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, etc.). Therefore, all I see on my timeline are pictures of delicious-looking meals that my acquaintances are eating (especially in Japan) and advertisements for clothes, shoes, and bags. The only videos the algorithm recommends are dancing, babies, and animals, and since I try to retweet only the ones I want to support, rather than argue with, on Twitter, I’ve become quite peaceful.
I’m trying to educate the algorithm in my own way and keep my garden a flower garden, because I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by my inability to change the world. But I created a Mastodon account last November in case Twitter was completely broken.
An American friend of mine asked me, “Now that I’ve moved to Post, why don’t you come over to Post too?” but I didn’t join, saying, “I started Mastodon and I’m still too busy to spend time on social media, so I don’t want to add more.
He chose Mastodon partly because many of the Japanese users he had been friends with on Twitter had moved to this SNS, but also because of the influence of an acquaintance of his, Taiyo Fujii, who is a science fiction writer.
Mr. Fujii is probably the author of the world’s first “Mastodon novel. The short story “On the Shoulder of a Colossus,” included in Hello World, was first published in the August 2017 issue of the literary magazine Shosetsu Gendai, and like Taiyo, the “I” in that short story, Fujii also started and ran his own “instance” of Mastodon.
Let me quote from Mr. Fujii’s novel
What makes Mastodon completely different from other Twitter clones is that it was released not as a service to be used as a user, but as a program that can be owned and run. /Anyone who has an entire web server, the equivalent of a house, can set up their own “Mastodon” and invite their friends to join them. The program running in this way is called an instance (entity).
In this novel, the reader will find that Mastodon is a program that is not an instance, but rather an entity. I would like you to read this novel so that you can understand what Mastodon is and why Mr. Fujii started to set up his own instance.
I started using Mastodon when I was very busy, so although I created three accounts, I did not have time to learn how to use them. Even now, I haven’t spent much time on it yet, so I’m still “test driving” using only one account. However, fortunately for me, I have several acquaintances who have also been thinking hard about Twitter and social media in general, such as Fujii-san, so I don’t feel alone.
People like me who recently joined Mastodon seem to be in the process of exploring different ways to use Twitter. and the responses to those tweets. The biggest difference is that in 2009, “What is Twitter? had the innocence of a child thinking about how to play, while at the end of 2022, “How should we use Mastodon? at the end of 2022 had the innocence of a child thinking about playing, while “How should we use Mastodon?
Even on Twitter, for a time there was an atmosphere of sincere discussion and enlightenment about social issues. But in an instant, it turned into a culture of personal attack bashing and extreme cancellation. Mastodon does not allow “quote retweets,” which have become a source of flames on Twitter, but only “boosts,” which are the equivalent of RTs. So instead of tweets being less likely to spread, they are also less likely to cause flames. Also, since it is a decentralized social network, you can control quite a few attacks by choosing a properly managed instance (or creating your own if you can).
I wrote “flower garden” earlier, but I am not trying to create a relationship where we pretend that there are no major problems happening in the world and only talk about things that don’t affect each other. It is a “field that bears fruits as well as flowers” where we can make meaningful connections with people who have the attitude of “listening” to what the other person has to say. To that end, I feel like I’m trying to reset the site somewhere other than Twitter, but I’m still in a state of groping.
However, I am not overly hopeful. Wherever I go, “resentment” will wield power. It is a fascinating emotion that even I, knowing the dangers, cannot ignore. But even if I am outraged, I know there are more than a few people who would like to connect in a positive way with those who can “edit” their thoughts and statements before posting them on social media, and making such friends is my aspiration for 2023.
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