If Musk Wants to Protect Democracy Start by Looking to Our Media Roots

Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter is a mission to save not just democracy, but the future of humanity. At least, that’s how he sees it. As he told the TED2022 conference, making Twitter “a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”

Social media does pose a threat to democracy. Musk seems to believe the answer is more free speech and free speech isn’t all that complicated: “If someone you don’t like is allowed to say something you don’t like,” he said in his Ted talk, “then we have free speech.” It’s going to take a lot more than that simplistic notion to rebuild trust and inclusivity on Twitter.

Twitter today occasionally informs, often misinforms, sometimes provokes and mostly entertains in the way of a friend sharing a joke or the guilty pleasure of witnessing a nemesis suffer public embarrassment. It does all this in an environment that often is filled with hate and divisiveness, leveraging the incredible gullibility and ignorance of many Americans.

Musk ignores three realities, and he proposes to solve none.

The first is today’s culture. Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong likely has it right when he said (on Twitter, of course), “Elon doesn’t understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture.”

The virtues of decency and integrity often aren’t recognized in day-to-day life, much less in social media. Whatever guardrails Musk erects, there will be those who figure out how to bypass them to spread their hate, rants and false information. Musk so far has offered no solution to protect the vulnerable from those ready and able to sell false information, false hope and false products.

Second is the technology itself. Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, said Musk “doesn't seem to have a sophisticated notion of what it means to engage in a global media business."

Yes, the content on Twitter and other platforms often is awful. But it’s how that content is delivered that makes it so damaging to consensus building and ultimately to democracy. Too many believe that when they are on a social media platform, they are in an open town square in which large audiences hear the same speakers saying the same things. That’s not how social media works. Content is curated for each person; the messages, posts, ads and other content that pop up often are going to only narrow slices of users. We are in echo chambers when we think we are in large auditoriums. When every post that comes up on our feeds reinforces our biases and perceptions, we believe we are part of the majority and our opinions are based on obvious facts. So, why compromise or, for that matter, even be open to other points of view?

Third is the future of social media. Pew Research Center canvassed technology experts on the likely impact of social media on democracy. Among the biggest concerns are the increasing concerns over the growing power of artificial intelligence to manipulate attitudes without any detection by the targets or the regulators.

Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, told the Pew researchers, that by “2030, democracy might look very much as it does now to the average citizen, but citizens will no longer have much say in who wins elections and how democracies are run. My research – dozens of randomized, controlled experiments involving tens of thousands of participants and five national elections – shows that Google search results alone can easily shift more than 20% of undecided voters – up to 80% in some demographic groups – without people knowing and without leaving a paper trail.”

The short way of saying that is this: Republicans and Democrats aren’t the only ones trying to influence election outcomes by whatever means, it’s also foreign adversaries. That, by the way, was the conclusion of an exhaustive examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee, at the time led by Republicans in a Republican-controlled Senate under a Republican administration.

What America needs more than a trusted Twitter is a credible and robust media environment, especially at the grassroots level. If Elon Musk truly wants to protect democracy, he should take the $43 billion he has offered for Twitter and put it into traditional, old-fashioned, local news media. And he should do it not as an investor expecting a return, but as a hands-off benefactor. His model should not be media moguls past and present, but MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has given away an estimated $12 billion in mostly no-strings-attached grants to non-profits.

Local media outlets are in crisis. A study by PEN America found that between 2004 and 2019, the country lost more than 1,800 newspapers and 47% of newsroom staff. According to the study, at least 200 U.S. counties have no newspaper covering local and regional government. Another 1,500 counties have only a single population; some of these counties have populations greater than 1 million.

The study’s findings were collected right before the pandemic. The situation almost certainly is more dire today.

Local newspapers and radio stations once served the purpose Musk wants to reinvigorate – free and robust speech. Talk shows on community radio stations were important soapboxes for local discussions. Letters to the editor and local opinion articles raised issues and offered solutions important to the area’s readers. Those conversations mostly were respectful and thoughtful because they were public and moderated. No one could hide behind the cloak of anonymity.

Reporters from the still-functioning local newspapers and radio stations are in the audience during city council and school board meetings. They are at the ribbon cuttings of new businesses and document the closing of others. They hold public officials and community leaders accountable not with the big scoop but by reporting the mundane, day-to-day activities of government and civic organizations.

They report the news, then share the same information with any and all who want to read or listen. They aren’t the arbiters of what is right or wrong, but of what is fact and what is nonsense.

Community newspapers and radio stations won’t continue without financial support. The advertising base has dried up and audiences have drifted away for a variety of reasons. But the importance of local reporting is greater now than ever. This isn’t a call for Musk to own local media, but to unconditionally subsidize them.

Even $43 billion isn’t enough to change the media environment, especially for national media. But by reinvigorating local media and reminding people why it’s important to have independent sources of information – even those that are as flawed as all human endeavors are – perhaps it’s a first step toward rebuilding democracy on facts, transparency and accountability.

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