Twitter descends into chaos: fakes and hatred spurt out of the lovable, important platform. The billionaire has gambled - and a digital space is falling apart.
Many a little boy in the 80s had a poster stuck to the wall, which must have caused one or the other fuzzy conversation with his parents: David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight: A chest-haired man in a leather jacket and shirt open wide, always a tick too pursed lips, his piercing gaze directed towards the children's room. But that's sometimes the case with masculine role models on the threshold of puberty. He-Man can probably crack coconuts with his butt, have you ever noticed that?
Anyway, the real present has a muscular hero too: his name is Elon, he just bought and ruined Twitter, but he can count on one thing like the Knight Rider: teenagers and young men who believe even the most absurd mistake as a heroic act and would beat up anyone on the spot in the schoolyard who dared to voice even the slightest criticism of the role model.
Musk has worked hard for his male sanctity: He builds cars and rockets, has cameo appearances on Iron Man and Rick
The billionaire is the prototype of the loud white man: thinks he's funny (but he's not), thinks he's brilliant (surely he is), and kicks his ass when he can (recently he's reportedly supposed to contain the unfired workforce called for roll call within an hour and then came 15 minutes too late - you know gentlemen like that).
The problem now is this thing with Twitter. Musk has announced that the company could soon go bankrupt. That doesn't seem far-fetched: ever since the billionaire marched into headquarters for a cheap punchline with a sink, hate mail has blossomed, spam has exploded, and advertisers have fled.
Twitter, once a highly valued source for ultra-fast news (e.g. the emergency landing in the Hudson River), mutated into a feverish dream within a single week: verification hooks, which could be used to prevent identity theft, are now so screwed up that a verified George W. Bush "I miss killing Iraqis" could post. And a verified Tony Blair "me too to be honest" replied. "KITT, get me out of here!" one would like to call into the clock.
The disaster is not surprising: Musk has now fired a large part of the workforce, many of whom were responsible for combating disinformation and hate speech - the UN human rights commissioner wrote Musk a warning letter. "The Verge" recently wanted to send the company a press inquiry and then laconically stated: "Twitter no longer has a communications department."
It's a drama: Twitter is one of the most creative places on the web. A forecourt for debate, humus for revolutions, horrors of authoritarian regimes, a news service and at the same time a testing ground for literary miniatures and grotesque silliness, all in a handy 280-characters-per-post package. Wonderful.
Musk, the jack-of-all-trades, the super-maker, the Knight Rider of the 2020s, ended up having to buy the platform for legal reasons, even though he has no clue about communications. His bizarre failures are also evidence of the latter, for example at the side of Armin Laschet, who was similarly talented in communication, when Musk laughed out loud at the concerns of environmental activists.
Communication is not rocket science - and unfortunately, a global human network works differently than Elon's space company SpaceX or the carmaker Tesla. Musk at the top of Twitter, it's as if Ironman had taken over a daycare center for 400 million brats, kicked out all the educators and handed all the kids Red Bull and scissors.
The inhabitants of this wonderful place have few alternatives: There is the business administration nutcase Linkedin, an academy for hypocrisy, regulars' politics and visionary posturing. Anyone who verbosely praises, shows off and sells banalities in the guise of psychological insights will sooner or later have thousands of followers, some of whom, with a little luck, are not "coaches" or crypto maniacs.
Or "Mastodon", a self-made decentralized Twitter alternative. Anyone who likes to advertise to their circle of friends how "really really easy" it is to install Linux on their own toaster and what advantages that would have will probably be happy here. Mastodon inventor Eugen Rochko recently told Time magazine that he doesn't tolerate intolerant speech (and "hate speech," whatever that might be).
Anyone who opens the associated app can see immediately where the journey is going: Mammoths in pastel shades romp through a padded cell for those who are easily offended, a Twitter for Teletubbies. Each of the servers has its own rules, there are some for the Greens, one "for the city of Vienna worth living in", a "common room for media people" but, of course, also for right-wing and extreme people.
To each his union, the public shatters. Some applaud Musk's campaign for freedom of expression as a contribution against "the clouds", while others deny that something like polemics are necessary - "Hate is not an opinion" and similarly stupid slogans are thawed out again. Karl Popper's paradox of intolerance is misunderstood with relish as a general commandment of tenderness.
At the same time, our constitution also tolerates hostility to democracy within limits. Polemics and derogatory statements are protected in the heat of the dispute, as a court recently found in connection with the controversial biology doctoral student Marie-Luise Vollbrecht. But the Twitter chaos inspires the left: the state should take action if possible, the Jusos want to expropriate Twitter, ARD and ZDF should build a social network and so on: hold your hands, damn it.
The ideal of hard fighting within a community is lost. The digital public feels like the midterms aren't in America, they're here. There has been talk of filter bubbles on the Internet for years, without there being any solid evidence. Now a digital space may actually be falling into bubbles. If leftists and conservatives used to bang their heads under Twitter's roof, they may not meet again in the future. The Twitter space of ideas is deserted.
So more walls instead of fewer? I wish Twitter had a different owner, one that really breaks down walls. "I've been looking for freedom!" Because one thing is certain: this chaos would not have happened under David Hasselhoff's piercing gaze.
