I don’t like Twitter and it dates back to long before Elon Musk became its tweet chief. On this platform, it seems that a simple hello can bring you floods of hate, and you have to regularly block trolls.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
However, I find Twitter interesting for following the news when it’s happening, especially since it’s a social network very busy with journalists. When you follow relevant people, it’s great. But for the rest, it’s a mess or a popularity contest, where the loudest mouths most often win. I know how it works. I have 9000 subscribers while I have done practically nothing there since 2009. I would only have to leave one tweet fight with someone known to triple the number of my followersbecause we all know that the negative generates greater engagement than the positive on the platforms.
But I want to say no to drugs.
Still, I laughed a little seeing the reaction of Twitter stars to the idea of Elon Musk charging them a monthly fee. “They should pay me,” tweeted horror master writer Stephen King (6.9 million followers). He is absolutely right. The popularity of Twitter is due to these locomotives that are the personalities who have the most subscribers.
Since the seizure of Elon Musk, many stars threaten to leave the social network, announcing it on Twitter, which makes him chuckle on his own account. They put a timid toe on Mastodon, which is not very user-friendly for newbies, or hope for the arrival of Bluesky, the new social network that Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, is building.
But how do you leave the place that gives you influence? How to mourn an audience that has been patiently built with tweets? For some, the cold turkey will be particularly intense. The blue bird may become a cold turkey.
Many people are discovering these days that they built their influence inside a framework that was never theirs and that Elon Musk now has, only because he has the money. It’s his toy now, even though this environment was built by its users. A new kingpin is in town, which is not surprising in the Far West of social networks, which escape far too much from the democratic rules that societies have created for themselves, with pain and misery.
But what’s happening to Twitter is a golden opportunity to think about digital democracy, and our collective future on it.
Elon Musk says he bought Twitter to defend freedom of expression, but how do you like it to have you by the balls like that? Shouldn’t a place like Twitter be somewhat indebted to the community that drives it?
Let’s really think about it: if tomorrow morning everyone came down from Twitter in protest, Elon Musk would lose $44 billion, face and a lot of power.
” You’re fired! Elon Musk applied the Donald Trump method in The Apprentice by firing half of Twitter’s staff, under a restructuring plan that no one understands. This is where we see his degree of improvisation. It’s been downright chaos since his arrival, advertisers are withdrawing, experienced employees are leaving the ship. Twitter does not run alone with computers and algorithms, its operation also relies on human beings who take care of security, breakdowns, moderation, confidentiality, mechanics. It is above all through this breach that Twitter could collapse. If there is a real loss of confidence. In any case, if I were a hostile foreign power, I would strike now. Even President Joe Biden has said that Musk’s ties to other countries “are worth looking into” as a matter of national security.
“Elon sees Twitter as a city park, but this ‘city’ is not our city. This is Muskville,” tweeted Shoshana Zuboff, author of the essay. The age of surveillance capitalisma monumental sum about this “monstrous mutation of capitalism where the sovereignty of the people is overthrown in favor not of an authoritarian state, as one might fear, but of a new opaque, greedy and all-powerful industry, threatening in a radical indifference our free will and democracy,” reads the back cover.
This book has been with me ever since I read it, because I had no idea how screwed up we were with these web megalomaniacs who have a power in their hands that no human being has ever had before. them. And that we give them in a “radical indifference”, indeed.
So of course I went to Twitter to read what Shoshana Zuboff had to say about what’s going on with Elon Musk. “A public space is not owned by megalomaniac billionaires,” she writes. It belongs to the people, and is governed by democracy. Instead, we’re obsessed with a man we never elected to rule. Welcome to the democratic abdication of your information and communication spaces, your personal life and surveillance capitalism, where emperors are all dressed up and we run around naked. Paradoxically, no democracy can survive under these conditions. »
It seems to me that the power in the hands of Elon Musk makes no sense. What geek once created as a means of communication in their basement, which was to profoundly change our lives, and which we gave back to them a hundredfold by participating in it, should not belong to a single man. There are 200 million users on Twitter. Billions if we add the other social networks, to which we graciously offer our data, our habits, our behaviors, our guts. It is very dangerous to continue to act as if they were just private companies. Musk, unlike Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, didn’t even invent Twitter. To see him go for two weeks, it seems.
I sincerely believe that with the climate crisis, the other great threat hanging over our societies is precisely that of those lords who dominate us in the virtual world as if we were in the Middle Ages or in Game Of Thrones.
When will we finally take digital democracy seriously?