It’s time for MPs to get off Twitter

The Labour MP Josh Simons has told the Guardian newspaper that it’s time for Westminster to get off Twitter. He’s right. Twitter is no place for MPs.

Marie Le Conte has written before in these pages about the tragic decay of online social media culture. Once upon a time, it was a place to make friends and connections. But not any more. The hate has crept in, spreading across the platform like poisonous mould across a wall. It’s become a toxic nightmare and the reason for the change is that Elon Musk has made it that way.

When he bought the platform, he immediately let all the right-wing extremists back on, the ones who had been banned by Twitter’s previous owner. That, combined with the changing of the blue tick policy soon turned Twitter into a nihilistic morass. Once a blue tick meant that an account was verified – but after Musk’s changes, anyone could buy themselves a blue tick, meaning that nothing was verifiable any more. The significance of facts on Twitter dropped off sharply.

The one remaining argument for staying on the platform is that social media amounts to a new, radical form of free speech. To fight it out on Twitter is to participate in the great rumpus of human debate, and removing yourself from that debate is to refuse the offer of a platform that gives its users free speech.

But this is delusional. To stare into a Twitter feed is not an act of freedom, but a form of self-hypnosis. The antagonism and the revulsion that Twitter creates in its users is the point. The intention is to stimulate the deepest processes of your animal brain, to keep you logged in, pinned to your screen, scrolling. Whatever freedom might be, that feels like its opposite. The idea that the minds of people who run the country, and who represent us in Parliament, might be captured in this way is horrifying.

A person whose political make-up is forged by Twitter will be very different to a person who bases their opinions on their experience of the outside world. The outside world is a place of human beings, with faces, idiosyncrasies and a capacity for warmth. But the world inside Musk’s trap has none of those things. There are no people so there can be no warmth. Instead, there are only violent surges of the most dangerous emotions – hatred and fear.

And that, really, is the logical endpoint of Musk’s worldview. He is a libertarian, free speech obsessive, and has remade Twitter in that image. But the nasty truth about multi-billionaire libertarians is that, when they talk about liberty and freedom, they’re not talking about your liberty and freedom. They’re talking about their own.

Twitter is an engine of free speech in as much as it reflects what Musk thinks – what Trump thinks. But that means it’s not a place of free speech at all. Free speech means that everyone should have a fair and equal say. But Twitter’s algorithms are designed specifically to ensure that doesn’t happen.

So what is Twitter now? It’s a foghorn at the service of one extremist billionaire, who is trying to put another extremist billionaire in the White House. And that’s no place for MPs. In fact, it’s no place for anyone at all.