Opinion – Ezra Klein: Why Twitter is not, cannot and should not be a global public square

For what seems like centuries, we’ve been told that Twitter is, or should be, the world’s central square. That was Dick Costolo’s quote in 2013, when he was CEO (“We think of it as the global town square”), and Jack Dorsey, one of the network’s founders, also used it in 2018 (“People use Twitter as a a digital public square”).

Now it comes from Elon Musk (“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it’s important to the future of civilization to have a common digital square”). The metaphor is wrong on three levels.

First, there is not, cannot be, and should not be a “global public square”. The world needs many squares, not one. Public spaces are rooted in the communities and contexts in which they exist. This is also true of Twitter, which is less a singular entity than a digital multiverse. What Twitter means to Zimbabwean activists is not what it means to British gamers.

Second, city squares are public spaces governed in some way by the public. That’s what makes them a public square, rather than a square in a city. They are not the toys of capricious billionaires. They don’t exist, as Twitter has existed for so long, to give back to shareholders.

(And as savage as Musk’s reign has already been, remember that he tried to back out of that deal, and Twitter’s leadership, knowing he didn’t want the job or treat his employees with care, forced him to guarantee which executives and shareholders would receive their payments.)

A public square controlled by a man is not a public square. It’s a showcase, an art project, or possibly a game reserve.

Third, what matters to a political entity is not the mere existence of a public square, but the condition in which the city’s inhabitants find themselves when they arrive. Squares can host debates, host craft fairs, serve as a stage for fights and lynchings. Civilization does not depend on a place to gather. It depends on what happens when people get together.

So much genius, trickery and money turned into a wrong metaphor. The competition to create and own the digital square can be good business, but it has led to terrible politics. Think of the hopeful imaginations that accompanied the early days of the social network: we would know each other across time and space; we would share with each other across cultures and generations; we would inform each other across borders and factions. Billions of people use these services. Its scale is truly civilizational.

And what did they get? Is the world more democratic? Is the growth of the Gross Domestic Product higher? Is innovation faster? Do we look wiser? Do we look kinder? Are we happier? Shouldn’t something, anything, have gotten noticeably better in the short decades since these services have invaded our lives?

I think there’s a reason why so little has improved and so much has gotten worse. It’s this: the cost of so much connection and information has been the deterioration of our capacity for attention and reflection. And the quality of our attention and reflection is what matters most.

In a recent article, Benjamin Farrer, a political scientist at Knox College in Illinois, argues that we have misunderstood the key resource on which democracy and perhaps civilization depends. That resource is attention. But not your attention or my attention. Our attention.

Attention, in this sense, is a collective resource; it is the depth of thought and consideration that a society can muster to deal with its most pressing problems. And, as with so many collective resources, from fresh air to clean water, it can be polluted or depleted.

One eye-opening study recruited participants from 17 countries and six continents and measured skin conductivity – a sign of emotional response – when participants saw positive, negative or neutral news. Negative news was consistently the most engaging.

If you’ve ever wondered why the news is so focused on tragedy and conflict or why social media provides more outrage than inspiration, this is why. Negativity captures our attention better than positivity or neutrality.

Allow me an odd detour here. I became interested this year in how the Quakers [grupos religiosos cristãos que existem desde o século 17] deliberate. As a movement, they’ve been way ahead of the moral curve time and time again — for abolitionism, for gender equality, for prison reform, lobbying governments to help save Jews from the Holocaust. This is not to say that Quakers didn’t get it wrong, but what made them so right?

The answer suggested by Rex Ambler’s lovely book, “The Quaker Way” [o jeito dos quakers], is silence. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members “sit together in silence for about an hour, rising to speak only if moved to do so, and to share some vision that will be valuable to others. “. If they have to decide an issue collectively, “they will wait together in silence, again, to discern what must be done.”

There is much that discussion can offer, but much that it can obscure. “To get a clear sense of what is going on in our lives, we Quakers try to dig deeper,” he writes. “We have to let go of our active, restless minds to do this. We are quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”

I find this powerful in part because I see it in myself. I know how I respond in the heat of an argument, when my whole being is tense. And I know how to process difficult questions or emotions after quiet reflection, when there is time for my spirit to settle. I know what my best self is.

Democracy is not and will not be a long Quaker meeting. But there is wisdom here worth pondering. We don’t make our best decisions, as individuals or as a collective, when our minds are at their most active and restless. However, “active and restless” is about as accurate a description of the Twitter mind as I can get. Having put us in an active and restless state of mind, Twitter encourages us to fire off strong statements on the most divisive issues possible, always keeping an eye on how quickly they will accumulate likes and retweets, and therefore viral power. It’s insane.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs. I asked her what it would mean for the social network to be run democratically, given the distrust many Americans have — and with good reason — of the state. (Imagine if the Trump administration owned Twitter.) “Does the social sector mean anything in the American context?” she asked me.

By social sector, Tang meant what we sometimes call civil society—the layer of associations and organizations between the government and the market. In Taiwan, major parts of the digital infrastructure are managed at this level.

The PTT Bulletin Board System, which she described as Taiwan’s Reddit, is still owned by the student group that started it. It was part of how Taiwan responded so early and so effectively to the coronavirus. “It has no shareholders,” Tang said. “No advertisers. It’s fully within the academic network. It’s fully open source. Fully community governed. People can join freely. It’s a public digital space.”

There are those who believe that the social network is reaching its end point. I hope you’re right. Platforms and platforms were designed to make it easier and more addictive for us to share content, so that the corporations behind them could sell more and more of our attention and our data. In different ways, most of these platforms are in decline.

What if the next turn of the media dial was measured not by how much attention we gave a platform, but how much it gave us? I’m not sure what that service would look like. But I’m hungry for it, and I suspect many other people are too.