Love for X in the time of cholera
Love for X in the time of cholera
The social platform is unparalleled in the way it distributes information and opinion direct to the public.
Summary: With violence happening in Israel and Gaza that may draw the entire world into conflict, the social media platform known as X is unparalleled in the way it enables visibility of information and opinion on those developments.
Bear with me: This edition of my newsletter is going to come off as a love letter of sorts. I know it's a strange time to write one, but also personally reassuring to me in a weird way.
If you're like me, you've been deeply disturbed in recent days out of horror over the terrorist attack in Israel and in sympathy for the victims of the atrocities. I would call it our dystopic world in full display, but the truth is the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been going on for decades and akin to consistency rather than decline. The attack is a sad reminder the conflict is nowhere near a point of resolution.
Let it be known I fully condemn the violence inflicted against the people of Israel — as well as the 27 Americans counted as among the deceased — and reject attempts to justify the attack committed by Hamas or equate it to retaliation against the terrorist attack itself. The stories and images we keep seeing each day keep getting worse, whether it's the slaughter of infants and toddlers, the execution of the elderly or the gruesome murders of the victims fleeing in terror.
So here's where the love letter comes in: I want to devote this space for my adoration for the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, now rebranded as X by Elon Musk.
In an unparalleled way, X has been able to provide real-time updates on details about the attack — gruesome but nonetheless crucial to understand — as well as responses to those details across the spectrum, which are equally as significant if not more so. Even if I disagree with those reactions, they enhance my own thoughtfulness on the developments by forcing me to refine my views or come up with a reason why I outright reject the conclusion.
I welcome posts across the board. I want to be able to see calls for escalation into a war even when I'm wary of extended U.S. involvement that may end up just producing more violence. I want to be able to see celebrations of Palestine after the attacks so I know they're happening even when I think they're distasteful. For that matter, I object, out of concerns for freedom of expression, to the emerging restrictions imposed on peaceful demonstrations in Europe.
As a platform X organically offers a platform for voices in ways mainstream media cannot match in timing and breath. That's not to say journalism as traditionally understood doesn't have a role. In fact, it's complementary to X in the way the media can centralize discourse and confirm developments with the added authority of those outlets. So I'm not quite ready to throw out the old ways of communication yet.
The community notes feature, added by Musk shortly after he took the helm of the platform, has been a brilliant way to correct and provide needed context to post lacking in truth or require additional information. Enabling users to provide that context is a supremely better system than delegating that role solely to an arbiter of truth, commonly known on social media platforms as a director of safety. The old system left a singular authority with questionable motives restricting and blocking different voices.
In addition to community notes, one important way X has operated is the way it limits posts celebrating violence in contravention of the platform's rules. One such post occurred over the weekend when Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, celebrated the terrorist attack in Israel and predicted “the usurper Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people.”
In the old days, the post would simply have been removed if Twitter were to enforce its terms of service (but probably would have stayed online when calls for censorship were focused on Donald Trump). Instead, X placed a kind of shield on the supreme leader's post, but allowed people to click on it to view the post out of recognition of public interest. Musk himself also flagged the post as “stoking the fires of hatred.”
I honestly believe X has become the best platform for discourse presently available and arguably all time. No where can we see the nigh infinite information and opinions uploaded and viewed in real time.
That's not to say it can get a little bruising. Very often opinions can be offensive and information can be inaccurate. That's why Musk — with whom I share an affinity for video games — once made a delightful comparison when he said X was a PvP platform. (That's player vs. player in layman's terms.) Just like in real life, the system of collecting information is buyer beware and one must carry the risk of accepting it as truth or not.
So that's why I'm discouraged when I see the European Union taking a major step toward forcing X to engage in content moderation. The EU has been crying foul based on a study that purports to demonstrate X is a major source of Russian disinformation. The study, however, counts as Russian disinformation anything critical or dissident over Western allies' approach to Ukraine regardless of the source. It’s also based on the conclusion of disinformation experts, who, in my opinion, are charlatans in a fraudulent industry.
The EU is now doubling down on that by making censorship demands based on very discussion of the Israel-Gaza conflict. If X fails to comply with the restrictions the EU demands, the penalty could be a whopping six percent of the company's revenue.
As Glenn Greenwald notes, the censorship demands by the EU is really an end around to engage in censorship in the United States. The First Amendment would prohibit the government from forcing X to engage in restrictions. However, if X is forced to engage in widespread censorship in the EU, it would may have to undertake the same measures in the United States for the sake of consistency and expediency.
I see a few other echoes of concern about X being a detriment to discourse and spending disinformation online. Sam Stein, a journalist at Politico whom I respect, lamented such problems about X in a post not long ago without immediately providing concrete examples. An opinion piece in Bloomberg, published a week before the attack in Israel, made a moral case for abandoning X based on reactions on the platform to the separate murders of progressive figures Josh Kruger and Ryan Carson. If you were going to have disgust, I would blame the people expressing those reactions, not their platform of choice for expressing it.
These complaints all seem very orchestrated and an attempt to destroy X because the powers that be can't control the discourse. Sometimes that leads to results they don't like, such as the approval of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Another more recent example is Slovakia electing into power a party opposed to continued Ukraine funding (which many media outlets are embellishing as a pro-Russian, pro-Vladimir Putin stance). The powerful may be disappointed with these outcomes, but them's the brakes, as they say, of freedom of speech.
If X is constrained so it can't operate with the same breadth of discourse it presently allows, we would lose a valuable tool in getting access to information in real time and direct to the public. That would set us back dramatically at a time when the alternative to obtaining information is declining institutions in government, business and media that only want us to see what they deem appropriate.