{"id":255641,"date":"2023-05-30T00:18:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-30T00:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=255641"},"modified":"2024-01-05T18:02:53","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T18:02:53","slug":"is-twitter-the-new-fox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/05\/30\/is-twitter-the-new-fox\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Twitter the new Fox?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Last week, Twitter hosted a live interview with<\/a> Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who used the platform’s audio feature, known as Twitter Spaces, to launch his presidential campaign. Instead of being a triumph for both the company and DeSantis, the event was an unmitigated disaster<\/a>: the first twenty minutes or so were mostly dead air\u2014punctuated by occasional comments from Elon Musk, Twitter\u2019s owner, who was to interview DeSantis alongside David Sacks, an investor and DeSantis donor\u2014before the Space restarted<\/a> with what appeared to be a dramatically smaller number of listeners. Twitter and the DeSantis campaign both tried to portray<\/a> the technical problems as a sign of how many people were trying to participate in the event, but Zo\u00eb Schiffer and Casey Newton reported, in their Platformer<\/em> newsletter, that the problems were more likely the result of<\/a> Musk’s staffing cutbacks. The team working on Twitter Spaces once had as many as a hundred employees. It now has around three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glitches aside, some observers saw the event as the latest in a series of moves, on Twitter\u2019s part, to position itself as the network of choice<\/a> for the American right, the most significant of which arguably came last month<\/a> when Tucker Carlson announced that he would bring his show to the platform. (Technically, he remains under contract<\/a> with Fox News, which ousted him in April<\/a> in the aftermath of its defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for reasons that remain unclear.) “There are not that many platforms left that allow free speech,\u201d Carlson said in a video<\/a>. \u201cThe last big one remaining is Twitter.\u201d Reports<\/a> circulated that Musk had discussed the move with Carlson prior to his announcement, though Musk denied cutting any kind of deal, insisting that Carlson will be<\/a> “subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators” and that he hoped \u201cmany others, particularly from the left,\u201d would join the party. In addition to the Carlson and DeSantis moves, the Daily Wire<\/em>, a right-wing operation staffed by commentators including Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, announced that it will be<\/a> bringing its slate of podcasts to Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he took over Twitter last April, Musk said that he wanted to make it <\/a>a non-partisan space for “free speech,” unlike the left-leaning network that he said it used to be. In order for Twitter to earn the trust of the public, he said<\/a>, “it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally”; he later added<\/a> that his acquisition was “not a right-wing takeover.” <\/a>And yet evidence soon mounted that he was moving the platform inexorably to the right. Shortly after he acquired the company, the idea that Musk personally was a political moderate became \u201cuntenable,” Philip Bump wrote for<\/a> the Washington Post<\/em>, noting that Musk \u201cendorsed Republicans in the midterm elections, suggested that Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted, and elevated baseless<\/a> conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi” (the husband of Nancy, the former House speaker, who was beaten with a hammer by an intruder to his home in October). Musk also repeatedly engaged with fringe far-right voices on Twitter and allowed both disinformation and hate speech<\/a> to proliferate, Bump noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was\u00a0originally published as<\/a>\u00a0the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In December, Charlie Warzel, of The Atlantic<\/em>, argued that, judging by Musk’s actions since he acquired<\/a> Twitter, it was accurate to characterize him as a “far-right activist” and his purchase of the company as an explicitly political act, aimed at advancing the right’s “culture war against progressivism.” Warzel writes<\/a> now that Twitter has undeniably been transformed into a platform “that offers a haven to far-right influencers and advances the interests, prejudices, and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics.\u201d In addition to cozying up to Carlson and the Daily Wire<\/em>, Warzel notes that Musk has reinstated<\/a> many right-wing accounts that were previously banned and has “emboldened trolls, white-nationalist accounts, and January 6 defendants.” In his own tweets, Musk has moved “from trolling to dog whistling to outright conspiracy peddling,” Warzel adds, culminating in a recent anti-Semitic<\/a> post about George Soros. Twitter, Warzel concludes, is following the playbook of platforms like Rumble, which “used to be the go-tos for canceled and deplatformed right-wingers seeking a soft landing and the promise of revenue.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myriad other observers seem to agree: recently, Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of NYU\u2019s Center for Social Media and Politics, wrote in Barron’s<\/em><\/a> that Musk had sent “contradicting signals”\u2014emphasizing the importance of verification “while launching a new system that enables<\/a> more convincing impersonation,” for example, or speaking at length about free speech while agreeing to censor posts at the request of the Turkish government<\/a>\u2014but that “there is now a clear conservative trend\u201d in Musk\u2019s behavior. Indeed, particularly in the wake of the recent Carlson and DeSantis moves, the F-word has increasingly been used to describe Twitter\u2019s trajectory: Fox. Last week, Sara Fischer and Mike Allen, of Axios<\/em>, wrote that<\/a>, at least in recent times, Twitter has “displaced Rupert Murdoch and Fox News as the king of conservative media.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Bump, it has become obvious that Musk’s intent in buying Twitter was “not only to dismantle an institution that he perceived as a tool that empowered the media<\/a> but to transform the social media platform into a heavyweight in the right-wing ecosystem.” In some ways, he writes, Twitter is better positioned to become this than Fox News\u2014it doesn’t have to pretend to be a neutral or objective journalistic organization, providing clear space for it to host content preferred by the political fringe. While Fox News was “pulled between the massive appetite from its viewership for false claims about election fraud and its ostensible newsgathering duties,” Bump noted that Twitter<\/a> “can give that same audience an endless supply of nonsense from users that he can frame as simply allowing free speech.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there are also reasons to be skeptical that Twitter has the power to overtake Fox, even if Musk might want it to. Fischer and Allen acknowledged that<\/a>, despite a recent decline in ratings in Carlson\u2019s old 8pm Eastern hour, Fox News is still “by far the highest-rated cable news network in America,” averaging at least one and a half million viewers per night in prime time. My colleague Jon Allsop wrote recently in this newsletter that<\/a> “no one has ever lost money betting on the resiliency of Fox News,” adding that any pretender to its audiovisual dominance will probably “first need to work out how to host an audio-only livestream.” In general, the audience for cable news is shrinking rapidly\u2014since 2016, the percentage of TV-owning households paying for cable or satellite has dropped from seventy to below forty percent<\/a>\u2014but Bump points out that Twitter and other social-media platforms “are much less heavily used by the older Americans who are Trump\u2019s and Fox\u2019s base of support,” making it unclear that they\u2019ll ever switch over to Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As DeSantis’s campaign launch showed, some candidates are likely to be interested in Twitter because they either don’t trust the media or are trying to appeal to voters who don’t; Allsop noted that DeSantis has long shunned mainstream news organizations, shutting reporters out<\/a> from press conferences and going after them<\/a> on social media, two approaches that are straight out of Trump’s playbook. But using Twitter to circumvent the press isn\u2019t itself new. And Elizabeth Lopatto, of The Verge<\/em>, points out that Trump’s Twitter strategy was different from the one that DeSantis is now pursuing. Trump\u2019s real platform “has always been television,” she argues, and so Twitter<\/a> and TV worked synergistically for him. “Pretty much every reporter on earth is Too Online, and most of them are (or were) Twitter-addled,” Lopatto writes. “Sending out a weird tweet essentially guaranteed him airtime.” In other words, Twitter was a secondary amplification mechanism for Trump. DeSantis tried to use it as a primary mechanism, and bombed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if Twitter could<\/em> become a new right-wing media powerhouse, would that be a worthwhile strategy for the company? Warzel isn’t so sure<\/a>. Fox News has been able to profit from television advertising revenue and cable carriage fees\u2014avenues that are not open to Twitter (which, under Musk, has actually lost many of its own advertisers). Right-wing platforms may attract investors and even new users, Warzel argues, but “they are, ultimately, bad businesses,\u201d since what fuels far-right discourse is the chance to make fun of the left, and if there are no left-leaning users on Twitter any more, then it won’t be as appealing. “A culture war is no fun if there\u2019s no actual conflict,” Warzel wrote<\/a>. Social-media platforms that cater solely to a right-wing ideology “become tired and predictable\u2014the result of the same loud people shaking their fist at digital clouds.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To the extent that Musk tries to make Twitter the standard-bearer for right-wing thought, in other words, he could actually make things worse for the company financially. It’s possible that he doesn’t care about the bottom line\u2014he is, after all, one of the world’s richest men\u2014but the speed with which he got rid of more than eighty percent of<\/a> Twitter’s employees suggests he does care about it at least a little bit. Even if he wins the battle to become the new Fox\u2014and that\u2019s a big if\u2014he may lose the war along the way.<\/p>\n

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Last week, Twitter hosted a live interview with Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who used the platform’s audio feature, known as Twitter Spaces, to launch his presidential campaign. Instead of being a triumph for both the company and DeSantis, the event was an unmitigated disaster: the first twenty minutes or so were mostly … <\/p>\n

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