Reinstating the likes of Donald Trump and Kanye West looks likely to turn the social media site into an extremist ghetto, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
This means thatis about to turn into a far more unpleasant and potentially dangerous experience. Little of this appears to have anything to do with a political strategy on Musk’s part. Like Trump, Musk has become the tribune of fascists and racists by way of adolescent contrarianism, an insatiable need to flaunt his control and a radicalising inability to cope with being told he’s wrong on the internet.
But not even the richest man in the world can pull that sort of free speech arena off. Twitter isn’t sustained by previously suspended users, but by the millions of people for whom the platform feels like a political and cultural slipstream. Twitter has an odd social media profile. It is both extremely influential and also often quite trivial, and the coexistence of the two is what makes the site viable.
But Twitter is also a solipsistic place, where even small users can become protagonists in spats that are then amplified both by the site’s algorithms and a rightwing media that trawls it for telltale signs of “wokeness” or “cancel culture”.
The ultimate cause of that demise will be the failure of Musk to understand that for some speech to be free, other speech has to be limited. It is generally true that if a service is free then it is by definition exploitative of its users – if you are not paying for a product, the axiom goes, then youBut in the case of social media, the regulation of your speech is the product.
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