By John Pickard
While the UK government is putting through parliament a rather tame bill to oblige social media companies to protect children who go online, it leaves untouched the fundamental profit motive of social media platform owners. Since its take-over by the super-wealthy man-child, Elon Musk, Twitter is allowing more racist and right-wing accounts to be reactivated.
It is not just Donald Trump who has been restored to Twitter by Musk’s relaxation of the rules. According to the Gizmodo website, Musk’s ‘general amnesty’ for extreme right wing and misinformation websites is now in full swing. Tens of thousands of account holders who were previously banned have now been welcomed back.
A software developer based in Germany has been tracking and publishing lists of Twitter IDs and he lists close to 12,000 accounts that have been previously banned and now reinstate since the last week of October. Even this number may be an underestimate of reinstated accounts. The website Platformer reported recently that Musk is working to restore over 60,000 accounts with over 10,000 followers.
Gizmodo reported on some of those reinstated as “neo-Nazis” and some linked to the Qanon conspiracy theorists. “White nationalist Patrick Casey is back on Twitter” it says, “even though he once ran a major group that advocated for a white ethnostate, Identity Europa, and coined the notorious slogan, you will not replace us”.
“Other subjects given a second chance on Twitter include Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi who has been running from a $14 million judgement made back in 2019 for leading a doxxing and harassment campaign against Jewish Montana residents”.
Reactivated accounts of known neo-Nazis
All kinds of racists and white supremacists are now back on the platform. The website Vice.com suggests that Musk is turning Twitter into a safe haven for Nazis. ”In recent days,” it reports (November 29), “the platform’s new CEO has reactivated the accounts of known neo-Nazis; shared a picture of a white supremacist who said he’d like Trump to be more like Hitler; failed to prevent users from posting videos of the Christchurch massacre; tweeted a popular alt-right meme; used a known antisemitic trope; and, inadvertently or not, shared a dog-whistle that white supremacists interpreted as praise for Hitler”.
As many as 70,000 accounts linked to Qanon were deleted after the storming of the Capitol building on January 6 last year, and many of them will now be expecting to be reinstated. Accounts that are anti-science, anti-vax, anti-abortion and against almost all of the established rights and norms of daily life are up and running again.
Although some of these lunatics are harmless cranks, many of them are dangerously inflammatory see their goal as spreading lies, disinformation and ‘alternative facts’ – a alternative reality, in effect – as widely as possible. Twitter will, once again, help them in this endeavour.
Increased use of the ‘N’ word and anti-Jewish tweets
Brookings reported that within twelve hours of Twitter being taken over by Musk, there was “a nearly 500% increase in use of the N-word” In the following week, “tweets including the word “Jew” had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer. Tweets with the most engagement were overly antisemitic. Likewise, there has also been an uptick in misogynistic and transphobic language”.
The other side of the coin is that it is by no means certain that Musk’s chaotic $44bn take-over of Twitter will survive at all. After sacking a half of his workforce and driving out thousands more by suggesting they are going to have to work harder and faster, the platform looks like making big losses. There are now elements of the platform management with no IT engineers to monitor performance and function, like an accident waiting to happen.
In the chaos after the take-over, the big pharmaceutical company, Eli-Lilly, lost its ‘blue tick”, only for a prank blue-tick ‘Eli Lilly’ to announce that insulin was going to be free for all users. That cost the company billions of dollars in a 4% drop in share value. Not surprisingly, Eli Lilly no longer advertises on Twitter.
In fact, Musk is losing advertisings as fast as he is losing IT engineers. The IT website Platformer News reports that Twitter’s losses are piling up. According to a revenue analyst, “Twitter’s ad revenue in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) is down 15 percent year over year…and weekly bookings are down 49 percent, according to screenshots shared with Platformer.
Musk is losing advertising as fast as he loses his staff
“It was a grim update to an already dire set of forecasts. On October 31, in a Google Sheet created to track advertisers who had paused their campaigns amidst Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of the company, analysts found that $15.7 million in EMEA revenue was already at risk. That included $12 million of anticipated losses in the United Kingdom, the company’s largest market in the region”.
The role of social media presents a dilemma for the labour movement because trade unions and labour organisations use social media widely to disseminate ideas and information to members. Just to take one example, Dave Ward, the general secretary of the CWU, has used social media extremely well, including Twitter, to present up-to-the-minute podcasts to members, reporting on the current stage of the dispute and the status of negotiations with Royal Mail.
Social media offers an unparalleled means of instantaneously reporting back to members. Even in the recent past, such a tool to inform, guide and mobilise union members would have been inconceivable. Social media cannot be completely relied upon, however, because in the event of large-scale social upheavals, for example where there is a generalised strike movement or anti-government demonstrations, the first thing the state does is to block social media. That has been the experience in Hong Kong, Iran, Egypt and in any other places in the world where big opposition movements have developed.
Besides that, there is a pernicious element to all social media. The goal of the platforms, including the big two, Twitter and Facebook, is to make money for the owners. The hidden algorithms – and they are kept under wraps for a reason – are designed to record the ‘likes’ and preferences of users and then it utilises them to recycle more similar posts to those that were liked.
Because of that, false ideas or dangerous ideas, once ‘liked’ are reinforced over and over. Going on any social media platform regularly, puts users in a ‘bubble’ where they are more likely to come across other posts and users with the same ideas and likes as themselves, reinforcing a single strand of opinion or a strand of misinformation.
There is nothing healthy about that and it has been noted, for example, that the reinforcement of ideas on suicide, often along with graphic images, have been directly linked to the suicides of young people.
Social media is used by trade unions to inform members
Although social media is used by trade unions, there is a growing case for labour organisations to boycott platforms like Twitter that offer an open house to racists, misogynists and reactionaries of all stripes. There is a case for ‘encouraging’ – using trade union strength if necessary – companies to refuse to advertise on Twitter for the same reason.
Social media is potentially a marvelous tool for social intercourse and general social and family communication, but only on the condition that it is not left in the hands of narcissist billionaires like Elon Must and Mark Zuckerberg.
These platforms should be government-owned, subject to democratic control by committees representing IT workers, users and government, with all the background code and algorithms published, and the profit motive completely taken out of the reckoning. Racist, misogynistic and reactionary accounts can be disabled, but it should be the organisations of the labour movement that take the decisions on the issue, not mega-rich spoilt brats. Perhaps then, these platforms can offer a genuinely useful social service, without the disadvantages of having to provide profit to billionaires.
