[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

I think it is relevant here that, in his efforts to buy Twitter so far, Elon Musk has violated all sorts of laws with no immediate repercussions. Both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are “investigating” the obvious facts that Musk did not make required securities disclosures and antitrust filings as he was buying Twitter stock. The likely outcomes of these “investigations” will be that the SEC and FTC will require Musk to pay small fines, likely considerably less than the money he saved by ignoring the rules. And Musk’s earlier scorched-earth battles with the SEC and other regulators suggest that the agencies will have a hard time getting even those fines, that he will fight fiercely in court even when he transparently broke simple rules. I wrote last month:

There are rules, and he did not follow them, not as part of an evil scheme but because he does not care. You could imagine the SEC getting mad about that and trying to impose consequences on him for violating the rules, but … what consequences? (The penalties for this stuff are small, and it’s not like they will prevent him from buying Twitter.) What’s the point? It will just be an exhausting slog of litigation and mean tweets and he will emerge unchastened and richer than ever, and then he will try to stop the SEC lawyers from ever getting jobs in the private sector. Why should they bother? What is the point of trying to enforce the law against Elon Musk?

Elon Musk has made it very clear that the rule of law simply does not apply to him, and this has worked well for him. If he wants to ignore the merger agreement that he signed, he will. If you take him to court, he will put up a brutal fight and make things as unpleasant as possible for you. This puts his counterparties, like Twitter, in a tough position. They have a contract. But so what?

Steve Bannon’s great innovation during his time at Breitbart was to hire Milo Yiannopoulos as the gaming editor, which really meant that Yiannopoulos was the 4chan editor. Breitbart, under Bannon, perfected a system where Yiannopoulos would amplify conversations that were happening on 4chan, package them in a CMS optimized for Facebook, and, thus, turn them into mainstream talking points. It was pretty much identical to what viral media sites at the end time were doing with the top-shared content from Reddit.

Soon the rest of right-wing media in America followed suit, chasing juiced up ad revenue they were making from Facebook’s algorithm, which seems to crave conflict. Now, not only are Tucker Carlson and his producers performing the same trick at the top of Fox News, so is most of the Republican party. They use the anonymity and speed of websites like 4chan to crowdsource ideas and then spin them out into wider and wider audiences. (From what I understand, 2chan has evolved over the years into having a similarly symbiotic relationship with Japanese Twitter, the country’s tabloids, and right-wing politicians.)

But all of this leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: The internet’s worst websites aren’t algorithmic. That’s just a fact. The overwhelming majority of the violent extremists who were “radicalized online,” were not radicalized by Zuckerberg’s products, but by other angry men online using simple websites to trade hateful, evil ideas and then do horrifying things with them. There is absolutely, definitely an amplification that can happen when the bile that gets posted on a site like 4chan hits an automated social feed, but the internet didn’t invent American racism. People uploaded it. And facing that head on is a much harder thing to do than just blaming it on a bunch of companies or recommendation widgets.