Elon Musk comments, on the prospect of allowing Donald Trump to return to Twitter, that banning him “alienated a large part of the country”.
Maybe, but it also pleased a large part of the country. It may even have pleased a few of Trump’s own voters, since a fairly common sentiment throughout Trump’s time in office among his followers was that they wished he wouldn’t tweet quite so much. It likely pleased Republicans in Congress because it meant fewer occasions where they had to dodge the news media in order to not have to answer whether they supported something Trump had tweeted. I’m sure it pleased the people trying to get Trump set up for a 2024 campaign, because it meant fewer risks of self-inflicted wounds. (His lawyers were likely similarly grateful.)
Musk’s reasoning, as many have noted, doesn’t seem like that of a savvy businessman thinking about how to turn a profit on his new company. It also doesn’t seem like a principled position on free speech considering the source: Musk has shown little tolerance for being criticized in any venue he controls or can cut off (say, by workers in his own companies, by shareholders, by the SEC, etc.) and he doesn’t seem to value pluralism as such. It seems instead that he’s judged that the “alienated part of the country” is a part of the country that he’d rather have as his source of value on Twitter than the part of the country that he seems bent on alienating.
That’s his choice in a society that supports spending billions on personal whims, but there’s really only two ways to make money off of Twitter if that matters at all. One is to charge some users for some use of the platform, whether it’s a one-time fee for getting “blue-checked” or a small on-going fee for institutional users. The other is some form of advertising or the sale of user data. The former move likely makes the platform more exclusive and gambles that for some institutional users the resulting amplification of their signal over the noise is worth a small fee. The latter requires the platform retaining as many users as possible, but also for the users to be high-value in market terms.
How many of his “alienated public” are not on Twitter today either because they object to Trump being banned or because they were banned along with him? Not many, I think, in terms of raw numbers or even in terms of influence. There’s still plenty of far-right voices on Twitter, and even more bots of that kind, who are alienated by nothing. How many might Twitter lose if he makes the changes he contemplates? That’s the question, but I’d guess it’s at least equivalent to what he gains.
The deeper issue is “who is more valuable” in that second pathway of monetization, and that’s been the more interesting overall terrain of political struggle in the United States in the last six years. I think it’s plain that many media companies, many entertainment companies, and quite a few consumer-goods producers have decided where their main source of revenue is, and that’s educated liberal-leaning middle to upper-middle-class consumers. At least for some of those companies, that’s also a significant proportion of their most important employees with the highest-value skills.
Some companies have set out to put limits on how much they will allow themselves to be pushed into particular kinds of politicized positions (Google, for example, has sent a clear message to its workforce that the upper management is not interested in the kind of attention that Timnit Gebru was focusing on bias in AI systems) but many of them have accepted the need for marketing that is friendly to diversity of various kinds. I may be gloomy about the shortcomings and failures of contemporary American society in many respects, but watching advertisements on television is a reminder that at least a few of those more cosmetic but meaningful things have changed—men are shown doing domestic chores, interracial families abound, same-sex couples buy detergent, and so on.
It’s an uncomfortable point in terms of socioeconomic equity, but in the political struggle of the moment one advantage that liberals and progressives have is more buying power and more centrality to much of the consumer economy. Not evenly: there are product lines whose customer base is nearly exclusively “red state” who need to play towards the opposite direction and others that really need to have the largest mass consumer base possible that will duck any entreaty to show any social awareness or acknowledgement of the politics of a divided country. But the balance is skewed enough towards liberal sensibilities that many companies have at least gestured in that direction for the sake of the bottom line—and perhaps because some of their leadership actually shares those sensibilities.
We’re at a point where you’re going to alienate some “large part of the country” with almost anything you do (or refuse to do). It may be that many publicly-traded companies care less and less about consumers period and only about investors, but many long-established corporations can’t just shrug off losing money because they’re losing customers. So far when liberals and the far right are squaring off to boycott or disdain some consumer product for a stance they took or an advertisement they made, most companies have decided that liberal complaints matter to the bottom line and far right ones don’t. Nike can laugh all the way to the bank at the spectacle of conservative white men throwing their shoes in the garbage. The commercial devotion of far right consumers is necessary if you’re selling MAGA hats, guns and MyPillows. For some companies, exhortations from Trump and his allies might at least (briefly) counter negative publicity—Goya is an interesting case here, where the CEO’s open support for Trump and the January 6 insurrection has plainly cost them some business but where buying spikes by Trump supporters have offset that.
If you want a sense of how much this particular field of struggle tilts to liberals, however, you just have to look at the move in some of the one-party states dominated by the GOP towards passing strong statutory restrictions on businesses that have taken political positions against the right, or equally strong forms of aggressive retaliation by governors, as in the case of DeSantis moving against Disney in Florida. This is pretty much the way the GOP works now: if they’re losing, they grab the game board and throw it at the wall.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that this is what Musk is really up to or at least what he’ll settle for. If it turns out that being friendly to the briefly alienated large part of the country ends up alienating another large part of the country and driving them off his platform, so that he ends up spending billions to reshape Twitter as TruthSocial, he may account that as mission accomplished, figuring that if he then ends up selling Twitter off at fire sale prices down the road, well, it happens. Rupert Murdoch wasted a lot of money on MySpace but in the end it was just a rounding error. It only cost Peter Thiel $10 million to wipe out Gawker, mind you, but what good is money if you don’t spend it? Alienating your most important customers is only stupid, in this view, if you’re not Elon Musk. If you are him, then alienating some of your customers is worth whatever it costs.
Image credit: Photo by Andrey Tikhonovskiy on Unsplash