The dread pirate Billy Bones is drinking himself to death, hiding in constant terror, at the Admiral Benbow. One day, a blind man presses a piece of paper into his hand, black on one side. It’s a judgement of guilt, but before the death sentence can be passed Bones suffers a massive stroke induced by fear and alcoholism and expires right there and then. Regardless, a band of pirates arrive and pillage the inn in search of a treasure map.
So begins Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which I’ve been thinking about a lot in the build up to Twitter’s 20-year anniversary. Over that period of time the social media app has dictated national politics, birthed and destroyed satellite media companies reliant on traffic referrals and become the place to consume immediate information about global events. There’s also a healthy dose of street-violence porn, war-crimes porn, and actual-humans-having-sex porn.
Its story has three broad acts. The first, from its founding until 2014, was characterised by innocence, possibility and frontier optimism. Obama, the Arab Spring, Wayne Rooney asks Rio Ferdinand if he wants picking up in the morning, pal. Next, progressive capture, culturally, if not numerically. This is the era of callouts and cancellations, lived experience and HR language policing. Lanyards, longhouse, call it what you like. This lasts until the Musk takeover in 2022. Since then content moderation has been dismantled and the cultural centre of gravity has flipped. Moral panics have been replaced by race science, anonymous Nazi accounts and “Your body, my choice”. Its memes are far more redolent of the Chan boards than Reddit or Tumblr.
Throughout Acts II and III, contested subject matter was unquestionably important (#MeToo, police violence, racism, immigration, free speech) but the incentive structure of the platform rewarded and still rewards maximalism. Median voters, people with accounts that don’t post, observe this activity, see what goes viral and start to believe that the extreme fringes represent the political centre. Does a backbench Labour MP actually follow someone who called for the public execution of Tory politicians? Why is the US vice president chatting to a groyper? Polling shows that many American swing voters before Trump’s election came to believe the Democrats were far more radical on policing, immigration and identity than their political candidates actually were.
Similarly, the endless racial grievance posting that characterises Musk’s platform is not representative of your average conservative. But X’s incentive structure, and resulting liberal exodus, renders moderates invisible. The median observer asks where the One Nation Tories went. It’s the mirror image of 2020. Whoever owns Twitter or X, literally and culturally, changes who represents political discourse. Whether or not that is a powerful asset or Black Spot is an open question. The old logic dictates that owning media companies is a very effective way to manufacture consent. But. Does Trump win if non-binary rich kids aren’t publicly shaming a schoolchild for wearing a Chinese dress to prom because she liked how it looked? The liberal excesses of the Jack Dorsey regime were central to a culture war that electorally punished the American left. We will soon see if there is a consequential backlash to the skull-measuring brigade.
When I think about the great posters of the last 20 years – a post pantheon, if you will – it was the funniest, the angriest, the most transgressive and least inhibited that made it big. And those people became ambassadors for movements they didn’t actually represent. Twitter’s progressive monoculture contributed to a broader cultural backlash that politicians like Donald Trump successfully exploited. Musk’s X increasingly showcases the online right’s most extreme subcultures, making them appear more representative than they are.
Ezra Klein has repeatedly argued that Twitter shapes elite opinion far more than public opinion because journalists, politicians and activists live there. In interviews around his book Why We’re Polarized, he argued Twitter encourages everyone to see “the worst of the other side”, but also increasingly the “worst of the people we used to think of as on our side”, and that political elites then drag real politics toward Twitter’s incentive structure. Matthew Yglesias has made adjacent arguments for years about Democrats allowing activist Twitter to define their priorities. Nate Silver has argued that elite Twitter dramatically distorts journalists’ understanding of public opinion. David Shor’s work isn’t really about Twitter itself, but repeatedly argues that activist discourse moves parties away from median voters. What’s interesting to me is that the app doesn’t have a fixed ideological bias. It has a structural bias towards whichever faction currently dominates the platform, and that dominance breeds excess.
Billy Bones wasn’t killed by the Black Spot. It is, after all, just a marked piece of paper. It doesn’t tell you who Bones actually was; it tells you what his old gang had decided he represented. What it meant – judgement by his peers and his resulting social excommunication and likely death – psychologically destroyed him. The Black Spot is a weapon of reputation. It says: your tribe, your old partners in crime, have decided what you are. It is a symbol that turns accusation into reality.
The viral fire storm is a parallel. First, a faction identifies someone as a traitor, heretic or enemy. Then, a simplified moral judgement spreads and the person in question comes to be defined by the accusation. Then institutions and outsiders witness all this and reach their own conclusions about the wider group. Twitter has spent 20 years proving the same lesson twice: whichever political tribe mistakes the platform for the country eventually discovers the country hates looking like Twitter.
[Further reading: How to kill a university’s reputation]
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