Is Musk's Disruption of Twitter a Partial Internet Shutdown for the US Election? (Let's hope not!)

I want to put in one place now some of the conversations and thoughts we have been having on twitter, about Twitter. I don't want to be sensationalist -- these are just conjectures, and we don't know yet which ones will turn out to be true. But it's important to think through the possibilities. 
By the way, I'm also not sure right now is a good time
for Academics to all "look away" while organising
themselves somewhere else.

The great thing about twitter, the reason I really enjoy it, is that it has this short format, so each person who posts (except the ones who make huge threads all the time) is doing the hard cognitive work of compressing what they want to communicate so that others can understand it as efficiently as possible. Because you can read and write fairly quickly, to me twitter is like a conversation in a pub or at a conference. 

A lot of people use twitter for nothing in particular, or infotainment, or chatting with friends. But scientists, journalists, politicians, policy makers, and diplomats all do serious work there. We really craft ideas and learn from each other, it's literally a part of my job, a way I stay academically informed and keep up with my various fields of research. As such, I think (like many tech companies) Twitter has become essential infrastructure -- in the same way that electricity and telephones did, and highways. 

Walker Bragman on twitter Nov 1: "The world's richest oligarch bought arguably the world's most influential and prolific online political forum and ended moderation of misinformation and bot activity in the days leading up to a major election. That's not liberation. It's a coup.
Click picture to get to twitter thread, which has
more links and documentation than are here,
while visiting many similar points.

I think it's insane for one man to own so much data about so many people, let alone the means through which so much good work is done. I hope that the purchase and privatisation of twitter will be fought in court and ultimately reversed. 

But right now the question is how will this affect the US and other upcoming elections? Is it just a coincidence that Musk has fired so many of Twitter's employees 4 days before a US election, where we already know a lot of candidates are running who either deny the outcome of the previous election, or even openly say that they will be locking up the voting system if elected?

Given that we already know that this has happened, in a way it would be hard for people to affect outcomes THAT much via twitter now. I assume everyone will be on their defensive.  Still, we already know that social media is easily weaponisable: you can use it to detect the kind of people you are likely to be able to influence (e.g. whether to make them more (encourage) or less (discourage) likely to vote, depending on whether they are less or more likely to vote the way you want). For close elections (and again, we can already predict pretty reliably which elections are close) this can be pretty effective.

But that may be the real problem. The real goal of a lot of disinformation and misinformation and other propaganda has always been to get populations to not be sure what the truth is, so that if the truth is right in front of them, they won't recognise it. So I think the main problem is not what people will try to do with twitter, but what they may NOT be able to do with twitter, like draw attention to fraud, or document voting violations or even violence. 

Of course, there are many other ways to do those things. But one of the pernicious things we have seen in a lot of the world is that when there is a political thing that a particular party doesn't like (normally, the presently ruling party) they shut down or slow down the Internet, so any violent repression is harder to document, and so that the people who's actions are being suppressed can't use the Internet to communicate. 

In a way, disrupting twitter is a partial Internet shutdown – a slowing of communication that will disadvantage any necessary quick work that needs to be done between citizens, activists, and journalists. Of course, there are other ways to do that, e.g. Signal and WhatsApp and old-fashioned email or even telephone calls. But it scares me a little to even be worried about whether this is a part of a larger conspiracy, and whether there are very bad things planned for the coming week.

Probably it's just incompetence. But just in case it isn't, I thought it was worth doing a quick blogpost, so anyone who happened to read it would be thinking about how they would be reporting and coordinating now that they aren't sure they can rely on twitter; and so all the academics and other election watchers can be not counting on twitter to support them through the documentation of this upcoming election.

Elections and election watching are immense, complicated procedures that are surprisingly robust in quite a lot of the world. It's a shame the US doesn't lead through following the good practice it encourages in other places and facilitating election observers from NGOs and foreign countries. Maybe we'll get there soon. But nevertheless, we need to work to support transparency concerning the information about how we do keep this system working so well, so that as many citizens as possible can understand and reassure themselves that the system is working.

A few other links to important conversations along this line – that the vandalism of Twitter may be a deliberate sacrifice of excessive wealth to achieve political goals.  Note that none of these conjectures are mutually exclusive with each other. Mine above just frames this for a particular political science concern: the ways autocracies manipulate Internet access.

Comments

Post a Comment