A year has now elapsed since Elon Musk took charge of Twitter with a Dad joke: carrying a kitchen sink into the company’s San Francisco HQ. (“Let that sink in!” he tweeted.) According to bien pensant opinion, the acquisition has been a catastrophe. A disaster for the social media network, which has lost both revenue and users; for the finances of everyone backing the deal; and for Musk’s personal reputation as the greatest industrialist of the post-industrial era. 

This is true, up to a point. Musk’s scattergun initiatives have alienated some of his keenest supporters. Removing the ability to block — an essential anti-harassment tool for users, particularly women — was followed by stripping headlines from articles shared on the site. This week Musk exposed users to spam calls, just the latest in a list of objectively poor decisions (blocking was retained). The desire to turn the network into an “everything app” and the name change are dotcom-era fantasies of a younger Musk, ones the older man can’t seem to relinquish. 

Some perspective is needed. Commentators taking delight at every misstep have some skin in the game, having come to regard Twitter as their very own safe space, basking in the credentials that the old management made specially for them, and so carefully rationed — the blue tick mark. High-profile journalists left as noisily as they could, in the manner of theatregoers walking out halfway through a particularly objectionable performance. Or they pretended to leave, but stuck around anyway.

Twitter already had deep problems, and the cosy arrangements only masked them. It had rarely made money, posting losses in eight of the 10 years prior to the acquisition. Faced with an advertising market dipping into recession, Musk had to make savage cuts. The headcount reductions don’t seem to have affected the user experience significantly. 

Indeed, Musk boasts that the development team is 15-20% of its pre-acquisition size, but is five times more productive in delivering new features. The experiment has exposed one of Silicon Valley’s worst kept secrets: software development is a well-rewarded sinecure, and over-staffing is rife. If a faceless hedge fund, rather than Musk, had acquired Twitter, it would have been obliged to do much of this, too: cut costs, and seek new revenue streams. 

Musk’s biggest problem is really a self-imposed one. Prior to the takeover, he had made numerous references to the “woke mind virus”, which he viewed as a civilisation-ending threat. Twitter or X, he promised, would henceforth be a haven for free speech and free thought. 

Except that the blob he has antagonised, which has weaponised “disinformation” and “hate speech”, is a far bigger, deeper and more amorphous collection of interests than he can have anticipated. Within 48 hours of the kitchen sink stunt, the Guardian was sounding the alarm: “News of the deal […] brought immediate warnings that it must not lead to a surge in hate speech and disinformation on the platform, which has more than 230 million users.” Musk maintains that campaigners targeted Twitter with a boycott to regain control of the platform. But satisfying them, and users, can’t be reduced to an engineering problem that he can solve. 

Musk’s naive belief that he can succeed in creating a non-hierarchical and free “public square” for speech may be his biggest miscalculation. As Jaron Lanier has argued, policing a flat playing field is an impossible task for any platform. We gravitate towards groups, where we police ourselves. And alternatively tacking one way, to greater permissiveness, or another, to greater censorship, doesn’t solve the conundrum. Perhaps no one can.