No, the liberals will not leave Twitter

The hyper-partisans of the cultural hegemony won’t leave Twitter. They need to access its casual users for their strategy to be successful.

With the recent acquisition of the world's largest social media platform by billionaire Elon Musk, the battle cry of “I’m leaving Twitter” has rapidly spread among the bluecheck caste. The chances of this actually manifesting in any notable number of people jumping ship are next to zero. They aren't going to move to another site, and they especially will not be moving to the much-touted Mastodon, the domain of basement-bound tech nerds so complex as to be rendered effectively useless to anyone without an MA in Programming.

Indeed, the impossibility of migrating from the Big Tech titans has already played out in the likes of Gab, Parler and Gettr. Social media falls strictly under the economic concept of a natural monopoly, its utility and functionality entirely derived from everyone sharing the same platform to maximise reach and facilitate wider interaction. In the same way there are not many competing railways built along the same routes, there will not be many competing Twitters.

Additionally, a key part of the politicisation of social media and its effectiveness as a control mechanism upon the ‘masses’ is by the careful and subconscious intertwining of the seemingly non-partisan with the brazenly hyper-partisan. The average Gen Zer’s uber-liberal anarchist politics isn’t something that spontaneously appeared as a sign of plucky rebellious yoofs; it’s the product of algorithms and content controllers, carefully referring impressionable young viewers toward Breadtube (this being the epithet used to describe a loose collective of corporate-astroturfed radical-liberal content creators produced in response to the right-wing shift online in the early-to-mid 2010s) and queer theory in between hours of scrolling TikTok digital slop and borderline pornographic e-girl streamers.

(I should note that I use the term liberal in its full sense and not its particularly American one. That is, as it pertains to the whole project of advancing the Enlightenment, rationalism, scientific materialism, the primacy of the individual and so on toward their end point. This broadly encapsulates Elon Musk's own views, and I remain skeptical of him too in the wider political context even though I welcome this development for pragmatic and selfish reasons.)

The hyper-partisans of the cultural hegemony need to access these casual users for this strategy to be successful. Abandoning the platforms they interact with them on, under an explicitly hyper-partisan raison d’être that casual users will not follow, defeats the entire purpose of trying to control the flow of information on Twitter to begin with.

Indeed the censorship of anti-establishment voices on social media is a result of the fact exposure to them can reproduce the same patterns of ideological adherence in the other direction. The hegemon operates by making adoption of its ideology a sign of status and loyalty. It becomes ‘cool’ and ingrained into wider online cultural trends.

There was a lot of truth in claiming that the spread of 4chan memes was drawing young people into right-wing thinking as these undercurrents became caught up in the more innocuous surface-level internet culture. The tightening of the noose around the free-flow of information online was designed to counteract and limit that organic trend, forcefully and mechanically substituting it with the hegemonic ideology.

In many ways, what we are witnessing is simply a digitised version of the well-crafted, top-down sex, drugs and rock n’ roll cultural revolution of the 1960s. This is not a new phenomenon in the culture wars.

Sure, losing control of the algorithm hurts them, but it's not like they won't still control the vast majority of established and wide-reaching media outlets and figures operating on Twitter itself. Reaching the casuals who will gravitate to the best-established and widely-used platform – which Twitter will remain, bar perhaps a Biden administration decision to suddenly decide that anti-trust laws do indeed apply to Big Tech (I have noticed that several prominent commentators have suddenly become open to the idea that social media is indeed the new public square, that it is an oligopoly/monopoly, and therefore should not be privately controlled or unregulated. It is not difficult to imagine various Western governments drafting laws to either force Twitter to restrict speech (this is more likely how it will manifest in the UK and Europe) or to conveniently apply long-dormant anti-trust laws (likely the course taken in the US) – this is, after all, the modus operandi.

Despite vehement public freakout declarations to the contrary, avowedly libertarian Elon Musk is extremely unlikely to censor, shadowban or algorithmically manipulate Twitter to promote his own preferred narratives; the end result of the Musk buyout is simply a reversion to a level playing field in terms of what ideas can be discussed or evangelised. It’s a setback in what has so far been a totally sustained onslaught of victory for the liberal project online, but it certainly will not cause the abandonment of the battlefield entirely for the enemy to take. In the end, the best outcome of this will probably be a performative few weeks of peace from the most significantly demented of the Emily 23 Bristol Uni they/them #BLM #FBPE hivemind.