Three potential timelines for a Musk-owned Twitter

Here at Galaxy Brain, we have our best people working around the clock to come up with mental models for the world. Most of them are harebrained or break down upon close inspection, but one endures. There is a single steadfast rule for being alive right now, and it is: Do not bet against the dumbest possible outcome.

Anyhow, it sounds like this guy is actually going to buy Twitter:

in case u need to lose a boner fast pic.twitter.com/fcHiaXKCJi

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2022

This is a reality that I thought I was mentally preparing for (see the “single steadfast rule” above). But the truth is that I wasn’t, because I’m not sure what Elon Musk buying Twitter really means. So let’s talk hypothetical outcomes (while keeping in mind that we refuse to bet against the dumbest ones).

 
The Dark Timeline

There is, I suppose, a world in which Musk goes wild and attempts to turn Twitter into a Truth Social/Gab/Parler free-for-all. This seems like it would have to start with a total gutting of senior leadership and the instatement of some kind of Musk loyalist regime. (I’m honestly not even sure who would qualify, though such people certainly exist!) It could involve reinstating banned accounts, particularly former president Donald Trump’s. There have been attempts to quantify exactly what Trump’s presence on a social network actually means, and what it boils down to is that his Twitter account was a megaphone for bullshit. Shortly after he was banned from Twitter last year, a social-media analysis from Zignal Labs found that “conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.”

This finding was overplayed by the media to suggest that Trump’s presence on Twitter boosted disinformation on the platform by 73 percent. That’s a blunt and unsophisticated analysis based on one search of mentions on one topic (election fraud). The truth is that we don’t really know all the myriad ways that one huge account can change a platform, though I think one can argue that Trump’s Twitter account was a chaos agent that had downstream consequences that reached well beyond the boundaries of a technology platform.

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Πηγή: newsletters.theatlantic.com