Last week the Business Post published The X Files: Leaked documents reveal how staff were stripped of power to remove toxic content and I want to come back to that in a moment. But first I want to turn to a substack by Jason Sattler (@LOLGOP)— Fighting Attention inflation: Why we must pay attention to how we pay attention, possibly written after he read the Donal MacNamee piece in the Business Post... or maybe not.
One of the most prolific and insightful commentators on social media about social media, Sattler wrote that “In a recent YouGov poll, respondents said that ‘friends and family’ are the only source of news about elections most Americans trust at least a fair amount. If you dig into the poll, you find that most self-identified Democrats also trust the news media, while less than a quarter of Republicans do. But almost everyone trusts their loved ones more than any other news source. As someone who follows politics, you know that people’s answers about their own behavior are not entirely reliable. But that people say they trust their friends and family for election news over the media clearly reflects two undeniable realities in modern American politics.
Republicans have succeeded in the half-century effort to break any sense of consensus in American life by appealing to moral frames of their audience.
The opinions and insights of those following the news closely play an outsized role in shaping our political conversation.
“This,” he continued, coming to his point, “has led to a situation that can only be called Attention Inflation. What we share matters more than ever. But much of the information we soak in is overblown, confused, or just useless. And like the inflation we’ve seen in our economy, it’s largely the result of corporatist interests doing the best to monopolize markets and gouge us. But unlike economic inflation, which has been improving pretty much all year, Attention Inflation is likely to get worse. The slow death of network TV and hometown newspapers will only speed up. There’s also the fragmented social media landscape that’s likely to become even more niche and targeted as superhuman algorithms learn what we click on and only give us that.” And that the introduction to one of society’s worst villains— on a par with Putin, Narendra Modi, Alexander Lukashenko, Kim Jong-un, Ali Khamenei, Xi Jinping, Netanyahu, Viktor Orbán and Trump— Elon Musk.
And then there’s the purposeful jacking of our attention, epitomized by two trolls so interested in shifting brains through their posts that they now have their own social networks just to do that– the aforementioned Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
If you know the name LOLGOP at all, you almost certainly know me from the old Twitter. I’ve watched a platform that gave me a pinkyhold in our political life has become a right-wing oligarch's Death Star designed to amplify and spread the worst hate on earth.
To many, the death of Twitter just looks like what happens when an overgrown rich kid buys a toy (or casino) he doesn’t understand and breaks it. But as someone tuned into politics, you know how important the platform has been for journalism, activism and independent creators of all types— all essential forces for progress that make democracy more sustainable.
And you know the pleasure Musk takes in purposefully assaulting the forces of equality and progress, which he calls the “Woke Mind Virus,” aiding racists and authoritarians everywhere— especially the bigoted authoritarian who is waging literal war on Ukraine.
And Musk has succeeded in deteriorating far more than just his own platform.
Though Twitter has always been one of the smaller big social media sites, it has played an outsized role in shaping our conversation mostly because most of the people who shape public opinion, especially writers, spent inordinate amounts of time on the platform.
Now they’re bouncing from platform to platform chasing relevance and losing any sense of cohesion— right as the news is more dizzying than ever.
…Trump ally and pardon receiver Steve Bannon once described his strategy as “Flood the zone with sh*t.” And the oceans of sh*t are rising.
That’s why what we pay attention to matters more than ever— not just to us but to those we love. We have to spend our focus wisely.
We can drown in the excrement spewed at us. Or we can take in and share out frames that help everyone understand the kind of mental warfare going on. We can use our footholds to lift up good candidates, campaigns and journalism with the people who trust us most. And we can refuse to feed the trolls who feast on our attention to grow even larger and more distracting.
What we can’t do is pretend it doesn’t matter.
MacNamee’s report for the Business Post notes that Twitter “has radically dialled back its trust and safety policies under the ownership of Musk— allowing users to remain on the platform even after posting abusive content, and stripping moderators of the ability to take action against these accounts.” Basically, Musk has decided that Twitter would no longer take action against users posting racist, sexist, and homophobic content. “[W]orkers have been told not to suspend accounts posting ‘content that incites fear about a protected category.’ … As a result of Musk’s approach to content moderation, as well as a recent antisemitic post he made, many major advertisers have left the platform. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the company’s advertising revenues are set to slump almost $1.5 billion in 2023 compared to the previous year.”
He wrote that Since Musk took over “Twitter, in October 2022, he has upended a company that has long struggled to draw the line between freedom of speech and hateful content on its platform. Musk, a self-described free-speech absolutist, has spoken about the enormous changes he has made to the way X polices hateful and abusive content— and has summarily dispensed with several trust and safety chiefs since taking over the platform. Last week, he allowed Alex Jones, the right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist, to return to X five years after he was banned from Twitter for posting harassing messages.”
Although I’m still using Twitter, I feel guilty about it. Like many woke Twitter-users, I wish more people would follow me on
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