Ezra KleinVerified account

And I share some of that despair. I had this conversation with @elipariser yesterday, where he said, "It’s easier to imagine colonizing Mars than it is to imagine building new forms of public infrastructure." What a great line. He's right.

Some people just disagree with me that it's on-net bad. But some disagreement comes from an inability to imagine anything else could play this role, that something better than this could be built or could arise. That it's this or nothing.https://twitter.com/DavidCornDC/status/1519423795563577344 …

My argument is we've made Twitter our public square and it's poorly suited to that. This is a gamified discourse built to maximize engagement and it shows. Twitter shouldn't disappear, but it shouldn't be this important.

People whose political outlook deeply reflects this often refuse to recognize it. One example: That Twitter politics has warped political perceptions and it's a huge threat to the country is central to Matt's commentary now, and yet: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1519432865141903364 …

Twitter goes algorithmic in roughly 2015. It's obviously not monocausal to our politics. But has our politics (or media, or...) gotten better as Twitter has gotten more important? I guess it depends who you ask, but I don't think so.

But I want to emphasize the "on-net" here. There's lots of good on this platform. There are politicians I like, who use it well. The question here is whether Twitter does more good than bad, overall.

A politics where there's so much shrinking down to what will 1. fit in this box and 2. get wild engagement is, on-net, a worse politics, the kinds of politicians and voices it elevates are worse. There's a reason Trump was Twitter's most natural and successful user.

But most things aren't like that. Twitter is built to reward single units of information that generate extreme levels of engagement. Is most of what falls into that category good? I'm skeptical.

This can be incredibly powerful when there's an outrage that can be contained in one tweet. That's true for many of the cases @Sifill_LDF describes. Enormous good has come out of that.

The nature of Twitter is it shrinks everything down to units of a single thought, image, video, and then makes it possible for that unit to go viral, reaching communities it would never reach and building a community behind it.

This is an important counterargument, so let me encourage you to read it — @Sifill_LDF's full thread, not just this one tweet — and try to answer it, and some others, and explain why I think Twitter is ill-suited for the central role it plays in our politics.https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1519418028445900801 …

"Everyone on Twitter is talking about X" has driven too much elite thinking for too long. It's done that because it feels like some vox populi. Soon it'll be Musk's game, and he'll never let you forget it, and he will wield its powers constantly. It's a very different vibe.

This is not a public square. It's a gamified discourse posing as a public square, and it does not have our best interests at heart. The way to "fix Twitter" is for people to see it for what it is, and treat it as that.

I don't think Twitter collapses under a Musk regime. But I think its contradictions become unbearable to many, in a way that weakens the cultural hold it has on key industries and institutions, and that will be a good thing!

How does a viral tweet or a flourishing following feel if it's to the greater glory and profits and influence of Elon? Maybe great if you love him. Pretty unsettling if you don't.