The Twitter

Have you been following Elon Musk and the Twitter saga? If the new House majority keeps its promises, a whole bunch of people are going to get dragged into Congress for some rather intense hearings. What will result from those hearings? It’s hard to say, but if partisan posturing doesn’t steal the show, we could see some serious discussions about the nature of the internet and the news media in general; issues that have been lurking in the shadows for quite a while.

The questions at the root of the Twitter hubbub are fairly simple. Is Twitter a private business, free to edit content at the wishes of management? Or is it a public utility, subject to regulation and equal access by all? Back in the ’90s, congress tried to clarify the status of social media with what’s known as “section 230” of the Communications Act which says, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The intent of the law was to protect social media platforms from submitted content they do not control, which seemed fair enough to me.

Since then, there have been layers of regulation added that limit the absolution granted in section 230. Those include efforts to limit copyright infringement, hate speech, bank fraud, kiddy porn, and a number of other things that neither you nor I would find acceptable. It all made sense, at least for a while.

The question currently at hand is the degree to which social media services should limit speech that is considered inaccurate or defamatory–particularly in the political realm. Truth isn’t always as black and white as we would like it to be, and claims of defamation are often in the eye of the beholder. In other words, content moderation requires judgment calls.

Suppose a social media company is indeed a private business. In that case, it should be the prerogative of ownership to make those judgment calls based upon whatever philosophy they please, but what if that private social media platform becomes the “town square?” What if the influence of that platform is so pervasive that there becomes a need for “equal time” requirements that were placed on television when the big-three networks ruled the world?

Those questions are being asked more frequently these days. There has even been talk of applying the old Sherman Antitrust Act or some other anti-monopoly legislation to force a breakup of the social media giants.

I can see how a company like Alphabet can be broken up by separating Google, from Youtube, DoubleClick, etc. I expect that to happen at some point, and I don’t see investors getting hurt by it. We have history to back that up. Despite his efforts to fight the breakup of Standard Oil, John Rockefeller eventually profited from it, and I suspect that Larry and Sergey won’t miss any meals either.

An antitrust divestiture seems legally feasible for a market leader like Twitter, but what I’m wondering is how one can break up something as simple as a URL. How would that work?

The closest model I can think of is the break-up of Ma Bell in 1982. Although the public wasn’t clamoring for divestiture of the telecom behemoth, the tidal wave of product development that followed was revolutionary. In a few short years, we went from renting our telephones (wall, desk, or princes) and having to decide if we were going to pay for our gas bill or long distance, to an embarrassment of consumer options and a highly competitive long-distance market. Who remembers MCI?

Few doubt that the deregulation led to great outcomes for consumers, but the backbone of that deal was a requirement that Ma Bell allow other companies to use her established infrastructure to compete for consumer dollars. It hasn’t always gone smoothly, but it didn’t take long for telephone consumers to reap the benefits of a competitive environment, and it’s hard to imagine the subsequent internet revolution without it.

So how would that apply to Twitter? Your guess is as good as mine. It wouldn’t be hard to separate the marketing arm of the company from the content side but beyond that? When everything comes in on one URL, how can editing be diversified?

For several decades, the political right has been complaining about a left-leaning media bias and I have reluctantly agreed, suspecting that the bias has more to do with the persona likely to enter the world of journalism than any elaborate conspiracy. I still believe that to be true in most instances, but Mr. Musk has released documents that point to a deliberate effort within pre-Musk Twitter, and worse yet, there may be evidence of organized, political-party collusion. If that is truly the case, we might see some fireworks affecting the entire online world in 2023.

Personally, I was never a Twitter guy. The cable networks and online news sites do a more-than-adequate job with breaking news, and nothing beats the depth of good old print media. Perhaps that’s my age showing, but there’s something reassuring about soy ink and wood pulp that conjures up the traditions of Gutenberg, Franklin, Hearst, and in our case, Strunk.

If you are reading this article online, bless your millennial heart. You are a valued reader. We’re going to need you in the years to come, but if you are reading print, you have something that a Kindle Paperwhite can never match. We will all watch the Twitter controversy with great interest, but we will stick to our newspapers–and if you are looking for Christmas gift ideas, Gazette subscriptions start at ten bucks per month.