How Will Elon Musk Affect (Beer) Twitter?
If craft beer is a niche and beer geeks talking about craft beer a niche within a niche, then beer geeks talking about craft beer on Twitter is the niche-iest of niches. Indeed, Twitter has never been able to appeal to vast user bases like TikTok (600 million daily active users) or Facebook (1.9 billion). It’s best among in-groups kibitzing with each other about common interests. After a decade and a half, Twitter’s daily active users have flattened off to around a third of TikTok’s, as those in-groups happily chat among themselves.
On the other hand, the people doing the chitchatting often drive discussions. When a celebrity or politician makes news for something (usually dumb) they wrote on the internet, they usually penned it in under 280 characters on Twitter. There’s definitely a bit of this dynamic at play in beer Twitter, too; the group chatting may be small, but they drive a lot of the thinking that happens in beer. I was wondering how that may change if Musk gets to remake Twitter into a zone where no pesky rules inhibit lies, threats and harassment, scams, and casual verbal violence. The beer neighborhood is a relatively calm, orderly part of Twitter—far more polite than politics or media Twitter—but I still fear it could change.
Speech Can Never Be Entirely Free
After yesterday’s announcement, Musk sub-tweeted himself, arguing, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated." This sounds like a high-minded, civic oriented statement. It seems to accord with the First Amendment, which of course stops the government from “abridging” our speech. The notion of un-free speech evokes Orwellian visions of people hiding behind the furniture lest a government camera see them whispering to a spouse. But think about it for more than five seconds and you see the problems.
Speech has always been a negotiation. Slander and libel are illegal uses of speech. Fraud is speech—we don’t allow that. You may not threaten a juror to acquit a mob boss. Here’s one I wouldn’t have thought to mention until recently: you’re not allowed to whip a mob into a frenzy and turn it against the US. In fact, there are a whole bunch of ways the law frowns on how you use words.
Turning to Twitter, the pervasiveness of social media has given bad actors enormous capacity to reach into the ordinary lives of citizens—and that means everyone from salespeople to angry exes to sexual predators to foreign hackers can now track down regular people. Free speech looks a lot less highfalutin when you use it as a justification to protect child porn peddlers—or any of these other malignant actors. Almost immediately, social media platforms realized they were unleashing predators into the world, and they created rules to stop them (or at least limit their legal culpability when it happened).
Free For Whom?
There’s a more subtle tradeoff when we take an absolutist view like Musk seems to favor. (He’s elusive about this, so no one has any idea what he’ll do.) This problem is less acute, but it’s vastly more pervasive. In order to maximize speech freedom, a public space needs to protect the people using it. Free-for-alls devolve almost instantly into cesspools of bullying. Social media platforms genuinely interested in the free exchange of ideas understand this, and that’s why they create rules to limit certain kinds of speech. If most people don’t feel safe to speak, you don’t have free speech.
This is where a “freer” site could damage beer Twitter. Social media has been incredible in democratizing who can mount the figurative soap box. It allows people who would otherwise be marginalized a platform. One does not have to navigate and old boy’s network to post a tweet. There are no gatekeepers selecting who gets to tweet—or whom I am allowed to see posting on Twitter. In the last few years, the number of BIPOC, queer, and female voices has spiked far faster on Twitter than it has in the world of meatspace where structural barriers and bigotry continue to create real barriers to entry.
In a Twitter where people were allowed to abuse and prey upon each other, that diversity of thought would plummet. The current protections are already weak at best (they’re far stronger in the EU), and stories of people attacked on Twitter are legion. Beer Twitter might not immediately descend into a hellscape of threats, and in fact I would instead expect it to look the same for a while—at least superficially. But people with something to lose would rightly be wary about saying anything controversial. Potential new users might skip it altogether. The effect probably would probably be measurable only in months or years, as the diversity of voices slowly waned, as people moved elsewhere. We might not see overt bullying, but instead a steadily declining richness of conversation.
It may not be a popular view, but I love Twitter. I find it far more usable than Instagram, far less creepy than Facebook. It’s the site for people with opinions, and you may have noticed I have a few. But it also feels a lot more “social” than many social mediums. I discovered a whole host of new voices there, and some of them have even turned into friends. I worry about a Twitter that seems more toxic to the people I want to hear. That would make beer a lot less interesting.
I am left with some hope, though. Elon Musk now owns the site, which means he’s responsible for what happens on it. One of the reasons social media sites created rules of conduct was to shield themselves against liability created by their users. Musk-the-owner-of-Twitter may come to realize something Musk-the-Twitter-gadfly ignored: owning something brings responsibility. Perhaps his lawyers will explain to him how “free” speech really works. Beer Twitter is nice; I hope it stays that way.