Here in Australia, I spent the three days of the Anzac Day long weekend mostly chatting with old friends. Over in the US, Elon Musk only had two days, but still he found time to buy an entire platform of chatter.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a big deal, not just because of the US$44billion price tag. As academic Ethan Zuckerman wrote on Twitter, ‘two billionaires will now control four of the major digital public sphere platforms.’ And as Australian academic Belinda Barnet wrote, ‘In order to implement his own personal definition of a “public square”, the world’s wealthiest individual has just bought the square itself.’
One of the most compelling responses came from Jean Burgess, a QUT academic who co-authored the book Twitter: A biography. In an article in The Conversation, Burgess wrote that her own vision of an ideal town square includes ‘market stalls, quiet corners ..., a playground for the kids, some roving entertainers – and, sure, maybe a central agora with a soapbox that people can gather around when there’s some issue we all need to hear or talk about. That, in fact, is very much what early Twitter was like for me and my friends and colleagues.’
However, Burgess continued: ‘I think Musk and his legion of fans have something different in mind: a free speech free-for-all, a nightmarish town square where everyone is shouting all the time and anyone who doesn’t like it just stays home.’ Like Zuckerman, Burgess then considers alternatives, including a publicly funded and governed option: ‘In an ideal world, public service media organisations might collaborate to build international social media services using shared infrastructure and protocols that enable their services to talk to and share content with each other.’
By contrast, Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey was effusive, writing that he trusts Musk's mission to ‘extend the light of consciousness.’ And academic André Brock, while acknowledging that Twitter’s openness ‘affords toxicity, racism, misogyny, and abuse’, praised the benefits of Black Twitter, writing, ‘Twitter offers the capacity to speak to/be spoken to by Black collectives AND Black individuals at the same time WHILE also participating in other public spheres.’
For our collective future, these are important issues. As academic Nancy Baym tweeted mid-week: ‘How we all doing this morning? Light of consciousness reached you yet?’
Sacha Molitorisz, Senior Lecturer, UTS Law and CMT
This was featured in our newsletter of 29 April 2022 - read the full edition here. Or to subscribe, click here.