So long, no thanks to all the fash: review of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Professor Steve Peers, Royal Holloway University of London

Photo credit: mikemacmarketing, image via vpnsrus

 

Full disclosure first: After exactly ten and a half years, I stopped posting on X (formerly Twitter) on August 10, 2024. I could not accept the owner’s view that those encouraging race riots in Britain online should not be punished, his promotion of those who held such views, or his racist memes about the British justice system that sought to bring them to account. I was not alone: X lost 30% of its UK users in the last year, and 20% of its US users. How did the supposed ‘global public square’ end up in this position?

The answer is obviously the owner, Elon Musk; and the new book by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Character Limit, recounts the story in detail. They divide the book into three acts. In Act One, dominated by former boss Jack Dorsey – depicted here as a diffident dude phoning in his governance from tropical islands – the story is retold until Musk makes his bid for Twitter. Act Two recounts the process of that bid, culminating in his purchase of the company. Act Three covers the subsequent developments: the frantic cost cutting, the frenzied management style, the fast-disappearing advertisers. The book ends in late 2023, with a short epilogue from early 2024 in which the authors astutely note that Musk has replaced Trump on the platform – in effect taking his place as Twitter’s main character. Musk’s personality – a fragile, petty, vicious, paranoid, narcissistic man-child – drives the narrative of the book. Musk’s legion of fanboys are frequently referred to, largely murmuring offstage like a Greek chorus manifesting as a Simpsons meme.

The book is highly readable – compelling the reader to turn its pages in much the same way that legal academic books don’t. It’s a highly personalised retelling of events, and one can easily imagine a Netflix version of its cinematic story – with its ending scene matching Hearst’s deathbed sled revelations, or Zuckerberg’s obsessive page refreshing, with Musk’s very public suggestion that advertisers “go fuck yourself”.

There’s a detailed account of sources, but in the journalistic tradition some of them are off the record interviews. One thing this academic would have liked to have seen would have been some broader analysis of why things developed as they did: was this all an inevitable consequence of the political and social media dynamics of the last few years, or an example of the (not so) great man theory of history?

If the latter, what explains Musk’s behaviour exactly? Drug use is mentioned – in a passage appearing so heavily lawyered that it has its own sharp and useless look about it. Nevertheless, the reader will notice Musk’s obvious extreme mood swings and erratic behaviour. At first, the prospect of saving Twitter financially may be have been taken seriously: the authors usefully remind the reader that Twitter often lost money even before Musk’s takeover (it also had controversies about hate speech already, and the previous management was planning to cut staff before Musk did). But that motivation is hard to take seriously for long, as advertisers (Twitter’s main source of income) started fleeing from the outset, with no lessons learned from their exit. Rather, it seems that the main incentive was Musk’s personal obsession with Twitter, also mentioned at several points; the political objectives that many have suggested are not much explored.

Having said that, this is a very readable book, for those interested in the fate of this well-known social network over the last decade. And one striking feature for this reader is the role of the law in all this.

It’s obvious throughout that Musk cares nothing, and knows less, about the law; he shares these traits with such luminaries as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Dominic Cummings. Although he has an early victory when a jury inexplicably clears him of defaming a critic of his Thai cave rescue attempt as a ‘pedo’, other litigation and regulatory struggles are a constant theme. Musk is only compelled to complete his purchase of Twitter due to litigation brought by its board (bound, as the authors frequently point out, by their fiduciary duty to shareholders) to enforce the deal Musk signed without undertaking prior due diligence. Compliance with an FTC consent order regarding privacy is an ongoing issue. Massive staff cuts lead to litigation over employment law and executive compensation. Twitter stops paying Thorn – a specialist in detecting online child abuse material. Conflict with a Brazilian judge over Twitter’s refusal to take down tweets backing Bolsonaro’s coup attempt leads to well-known consequences (although they occur after the book’s finale). Refusal to pay rent sparks legal challenges worldwide. And having cancelled the cleaners and crammed staff into less space in Twitter’s headquarters to save on office costs, the washrooms are soon overused. As cockroaches scuttle from the drains, desperate staff bring toilet paper from home or flee to nearby coffee shop loos to avoid those in Twitter offices. Cory Doctorow famously developed a thesis about the ‘enshittification’ of online businesses; he probably never expected it to be quite so literal.

I think it’s possible that future brushes with the law will concern in particular the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) – which, in a remarkable coincidence, was published in the EU’s Official Journal on the same day that Musk completed his takeover of Twitter. X is already the subject of the first preliminary findings of a breach of the Act on some issues, and investigations into further issues – including illegal content, the one thing that could get X suspended in the EU – are ongoing. I wonder if the risk assessments required by the Act should take specific account of the personal behaviour of the owner of a very large online platform – given Musk’s direct role in spreading disinformation and the negative effect of his posts on civic discourse, electoral process and gender-based violence. Recently, Musk threatened to give Taylor Swift a baby; but regulators gonna regulate.

A particular issue throughout the book – and an implied obligation under the DSA – is content moderation. It raises a series of inherent contradictions. Reflecting the sometimes conflicting human rights of freedom of expression and equality, the DSA requires very large online platforms to ensure free speech while considering the need to limit it. As for users, the book makes clear that content moderation repels free speech advocates while attracting opponents of hate speech; it costs money but its absence loses revenue, as advertisers are alarmed to see their ads appearing next to Nazis. But it is also clear from the book that Musk’s supposed free speech fundamentalism is hypocritical, as he bans and fires critics while acceding to censorship demands of the Indian government. As so often with authoritarians, there is an in-group which the law protects but does not bind – and an out-group which it binds but does not protect.

One final thought about the consequences of unlimited speech, returning to the reason why I stopped posting on the platform. When defending the ‘rights’ of those encouraging race riots in Britain, Musk and his fans compared those supporting limits on such speech to communists and Nazis. Let’s put this in historical context. After I flew to Vienna for a holiday after departing X, I visited the Sigmund Freud museum and was struck by the fact that his four sisters, staying behind in Vienna after he fled to London, all died in 1942-3. Their deaths were not caused by those who tried to censor Nazis, but by the Nazis themselves. And the postwar allies were not confused about this: Julius Streicher was tried, convicted and executed at Nuremberg for publishing the extremely anti-semitic Der Sturmer. Incitement played a role in the Holocaust. Words have consequences; and the real extremists are those who demand that the advocacy of hatred and violence should not be effectively limited.