SHORTLY before Elon Musk announced his intention to take over Twitter, he tweeted this.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”

Analysts, and Musk himself, have confirmed that protecting free speech on the social media platform is the reason behind the buyout.

I do not have space to go over the philosophical debates about free speech here, but I find equating Twitter to a “public town square” interesting.

Perhaps this analogy can give us a window into Musk’s concerns, and how his plans should concern us.

It is natural for humans to ground imaginations of abstract or virtual things in familiar physical geographies. The “marketplace” of ideas is one such example, but more on that later.

Another reason for us to treat the cyberspace as if it is a mirror of the physical world stems from the belief that even if we are proven to be meaner online, it is essentially “who we are”; something that dovetails with a popular empowerment discourse that convinces us that to self-actualise (to be “yourself”) is the greatest good.

In other words, online space is only as good or as bad as we are, so there is no need to regulate it as the habitat is as we deserve it.

We are not “ourselves” or freer online

However, scientists doubt that there is an authentic human “self” that is “sui generis”, i.e. untainted by surroundings. Likewise, it is far from the truth that our online “selves” are our “true” selves.

With smartphones, most of us simultaneously live online and offline lives. The walls that separate these two realms are thinner than we think, and are getting thinner still. Hence, our identities are a composite of both.

To use Musk as an example, again, his online following (up to 90 million followers on Twitter) grew almost parallel with his offline achievements, which included becoming the richest person on the planet last year.

It is unthinkable that his online fame is unconnected with his offline wealth. Bill Gates, who does not lead a charismatic online presence, also has close to 60 million followers.

People do not follow them because they won some battle of ideas. People follow them because they are powerful.

Our online persona feels “truer” to ourselves because cyberspace offers “physical distance, relative anonymity and little reputational or punitive risk for bad behaviour”. But it is not a “self” that surfaces without rules. Like any social space, social media has rules, too.

And these rules are not just punitive (the rules against “free speech” with which Musk is most concerned) but also rewarding (e.g. dopamine-inducing likes, follows, monetisation and negative reactions from perceived adversaries).

The only difference between real life and social media is that by virtue of its relatively young age, social media has a more egalitarian ethos, fewer rules and more randomness in rewards (such as getting “viralled”), which makes it more interesting than real-life experience of society that is more hierarchical, rigid and restrained.

But online space is slowly gaining rules of its own.

Much like real life, interactions have become less “authentic”, hierarchies are formed (Musk and a layman can both be saying the same thing, but reactions can be vastly different), and there are more restraints (which is why there is this pushback against the so-called P.C. police).

The public town square that never was and never will be

If our online avatars are not some truer and wiser versions of ourselves waiting to be unleashed, but just part of the many dualities of our nature, then it is equally impossible for social media to live up to this “public town square” ideal.

I call it an ideal as such a place never really existed. This image of a town square where people peddle ideas as if they are traders hawking wares in the market; where free and civic exchanges happen in real-time and where idea consumers will be convinced to pick the good, reasonable ideas over the bad ones is akin to one metaphor: a marketplace of ideas.

But the exchange of ideas is nothing like in our pasar. A marketplace of ideas is merely a figure of speech that has since evolved into a legitimising myth.

The closest thing we have to a town square is the speakers’ corner, where free speech is supposed to flourish. But let us be honest, none of the most fascinating ideas ever originated there or in any marketplace.

The comparison with Twitter is problematic because a real marketplace of ideas operates in distinctive ways than the social media platform.

Firstly, exchanges of ideas are mediated. Books have publishers. Newspapers have editors. Academic works have peer reviews.

Whereas concerns of gatekeeping are valid, society has generally accepted that ideas are not best served raw. Free unchecked speech is just cheap speech.

Secondly, the real substance in a marketplace of ideas exists in long-form, which is why books by Marx or Nietzsche have such enduring legacies.

Online space does have its own long-form content to match, such as Substack, but a tweet or Twitter thread cannot substitute for long-form content.

In other words, the long-term health of a marketplace of ideas depends more on archives and libraries (both online and offline) instead of this fantasy cowboy town that is Twitter.

Actually, if the public town square that Musk envisions exists, it will be much safer than Twitter.

In a town, people share the same neighbourhood and will be more conscious about maintaining civility. They will not say whatever they want as they care about the feelings (and judgment) of those around them.

This is unlike Twitter, where strangers live 3,000 miles away claim they know what you are thinking from only 280 characters.

Though a town square is, historically, not free of violence (such as racism and lynching), on Twitter (or any social media platform), violence, while not physical, is definitely more frequent and invasive.

A faux pas that happens in a physical town square may cause a momentary embarrassment, but one committed on the Internet stays there forever.

To quote a line from the The Social Network film, “The Internet is written in ink”.

Instead of a town square, Twitter is more like World of Warcraft

A large part of Twitter is unlike a town square, but more like an open-world MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), where players can band together and launch raids against a target anywhere.

Twitter, like video games, is an immersive social experience.

However, if the raided target is not a video game boss but an actual human being, what you have then is a torrent of abuse sweeping over a person who has no means of defending himself or herself.

Plus, there is nothing stopping online vitriol from translating into offline violence, which, for example, happened to secularist bloggers who were accused of blasphemy by militant Islamist actors in Bangladesh.

For those harmed and threatened by majoritarian violence after practising their right to free speech, it must have felt incredibly odd that the richest (and some say, smartest) person in the world thinks that the one thing worth his precious time and resources is to protect the right to tweet, not one’s life after tweeting.

To be sure, I am not dismissing all the good the social media platform has done and joy of having this spontaneous, hyperconnected and, oftentimes, very informative platform.

I am just wary of false equivalences as the nature of the infrastructure should decide the rules of engagement, which, in turn, impacts social behaviour.

By having a wrong analogy about the infrastructure, we risk doing something like regulating guns as if they are knives, using the absurd “guns do not kill people, people kill people” defence.

Ultimately, the fundamental contradiction here is that Musk is buying Twitter only because he knows how powerful it is; yet he still wants to manage it as if it is powerless.

It appears that Musk is equating a Gatling gun with a knife. – May 17, 2022.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.