The 2,000 Year Old Man and the Politics of Outrage
What Elon Musk’s suspension of journalists is revealing about politics and journalism.
Dear reader,
I know I promised year-end lists in yesterday’s newsletter, but I got the proverbial “bee in my bonnet” this morning and wanted to shoot this off. today I did so without burdening my intrepid editor, Sara, and so she is not to be blamed for any typos or errors. Especially errors in thinking, which are all mine anyway.
Last night, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists, including some prominent critics of Elon Musk at the Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as independent left-wing journalist Aaron Rupar.
As far as I’m concerned, this is simply Twitter being Twitter: an impulsive platform operated at the whims of its owners. Instead of its owner(s) being progressives from Silicon Valley (as in the past), he’s an enigmatic Silicon Valley tycoon and self-styled “free speech absolutist.” The problem is utterly the same: Twitter’s codes of conduct (if there are any) remain unarticulated, which means people get suspended for violating rules that, functionally, do not exist in the real world.
Conservatives have cried “foul” about this stuff for years, and with some merit. I say “some” because they often frame their concerns within their right to free speech, which demonstrates either stupidity, illiteracy, or a cynical attempt to mislead their audiences. You have as much right to free speech on Twitter as you do at my family Christmas gathering, which is to say, none. If you show up in my living room and call my great uncle a drunk and a racist, I have every right to throw you out; only we get to call him a drunk and a racist.
this isn’t about “rights”
The problem with Twitter isn’t about rights, it’s about inconsistency. Donald Trump was banned because of incitement to violence and a concern for public safety. Fine. Their judgment to make. But somehow those who banned him never banned the Supreme Ruler of Iran, a nation that murders girls for tight pants and loose hijabs and conducts public hangings (from cranes, no less) for the crime of being LGBTQ.
There’s a lunatic right-wing fringe that sees every trend that doesn’t go their way as a conspiracy, and there’s been no shortage of that with regard to social media. But the recent release of the Twitter Files has demonstrated that not all of their concerns were wrong. Account suspensions were often haphazard, and “de-amplifying” the content of voices they didn’t like was, in fact, happening. Progressives who poo-pooed these accusations were wrong.
Musk attributed last night’s suspensions to “doxxing,” and it seems he was referring to their amplification of an account that posted the flight records of Musk’s private jet. In the aftermath there was an atomic-fusion-level collision of outrage and schadenfreude, with mainstream and progressive journalists shouting a loud “how dare you” while Musk fans and once-banned conservatives took victory laps.
The whole thing just strikes me as enormously stupid.
the hypocrisy of outrage and the outrage of hypocrisy
I’ve said before that Twitter is a private company and can do what they want, including making judgments about suspensions or bans based on ideological principles. They can even do that without disclosing the terms of those decisions, as they did in the past. The point isn’t that they need to be regulated in order to enforce consistency (which doesn’t guarantee freedom but rather adds a new bureacracy into the mix, which may or may not be ideologically governed), the point is that users can choose to accept those terms — yes, even the shadowy and inconsistent ones — or they can let their fingers do the walking and head over to Mastodon or Truth social or if you can find it, Peach or MySpace. I’m in agreement with Charles C.W. Cooke, a contributor over at National Review, who has said before that the best thing for everyone would be consistent rules and transparency, even if that means that the rules and codes of conduct end up being as large and long as Les Miserable. People won’t read them, but they won’t have an excuse if they suffer the consequences of crossing the line. In fact, enforcement of the rules would educate users on what those rules actually are.
But being gleeful and taking victory laps over these suspensions or being enraged at them after rolling your eyes at earlier ones executed over similarly ideological boundaries makes you a hypocrite. Those taking victory laps especially are only telling on themselves.
I would actually like to see Twitter be more rigorous in suspending and banning accounts that are abusive and threatening. I’ve experienced some of the worst of it firsthand. Former pastor and professional ogre J.D. Hall once posted my picture, said I looked like a lesbian, and accused my father of molesting me; Twitter said it didn’t violate their rules. Whenever I post about antisemitism, I’ll see a number of tweets suggesting that I and my family belong in gas chambers and ovens, and to my knowledge none of those tweets (which I reported) were ever censored and none of those users were suspended. I did, however, once post a link to an article in a mainstream newspaper describing correlation between the COVID-19 vaccine and rising rates of myocarditis in young men, and that tweet was labeled “possible disinformation.”
manholes and papercuts
I say all this to make clear that I’m no defender of the way the platform operates. My point is that any laments over their modus operandi ought to push towards transparency and consistency, which means equal opportunity eye-rolling over dubious exercise of censorship, whether the target is “our” side or “theirs.”
It reminded me this morning of the 2,000-year-old man. If you’re unfamiliar with the character, he comes from a sketch created by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner when both were writers on Your Show of Shows in the 1950’s. (Just reading the Wikipedia entry on the sketch will crack you up.) While describing the history of civilization, he offers definitions of comedy and tragedy: Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole. Tragedy is when I get a papercut on my finger. It’s a perfect distillation of not only how drama and entertainment work, but how much of the culture war works. Shadow banning is a travesty and a crime against the first amendment when it happens to me; it’s moment of hilarity when it happens to snowflakes like you. The whole thing amounts to yet one more confirmation of the profound, underlying narcissism of the world we inhabit.
It will be interesting to watch events unfold in the coming days, especially if Musk offers more of the reasoning for these suspensions and how it may shape Twitter going forward. Part of the reason it matters is the outsized influence the platform has on journalists, politicians, and academics; ordinary people just aren’t that interested in it. But the cascade effect through those users seems significant. I’m personally far less engaged than I once was, but I still find it valuable as a news feed and a way to connect with people. If it collapses (it won’t) we’ll find something else. In the meantime, I hope we can all take it a little less seriously.
Maybe that’s what Musk has had in mind all along.
See you next week, with the aforepromised year-end fun. In the meanwhile, watch this and make your day better for it.
— MC