Here Comes the Judge and Other Disruptions to Your Online Organizing
By Craig Johnson (@CraigJPolitics) and Alan Rosenblatt (@DrDigiPol), Unfiltered.Media
In the days since Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter and Twitter’s board subsequent agreement to his proposal - things have not gone smoothly. Musk, merely days after the announcement, put the deal on hold in a tweet stating, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”
Now, this is an alarming statement in multiple ways, but probably not in the ways everyone thinks. First and foremost, Musk apparently did not do his due diligence before making his offer to buy the platform. A cursory search of Google would have produced story after story showing how many of the most popular users on Twitter, including Musk himself, have a very high rate of fake followers;[1] some as high as 50%. It is difficult to believe that someone who is as online as Musk and who had access to all the teams at the various investment firms he was working with, did not know that Twitter had been lying about it’s bot problem for a very long time.
But beyond billionaires thinking they are smarter than they actually are; beyond Musk spectacularly imploding his stock value (Twitter AND Tesla); the challenge of Twitter platform changes and our ability to adapt to it should be our focus.
An essential requirement of online organizing and, thus, of a digital director, is to adapt to changes in technology, business models, laws, regulations, and user behavior as they happen in order to get the job done; to reach and mobilize activists and voters even when the way you did it last time does not work anymore.
At the moment, the most urgent threat to how we use social media is the average age of judges in our judicial system and the effect age has on their understanding of how the internet works. For example, a Texas law that many thought would fail because of how poorly it was written both in substance and in practice managed to find the three appellate court judges who do not understand how the internet works.
The law is so poorly written, so broad in its definition of censorship, it would essentially prohibit the use of algorithms; both to promote content and to hide content. That will create sticky situations where Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are all forced to host content like the Buffalo shooter's white supremacy manifesto. The law would keep that online.
Now wait a minute, you’re asking yourself, how does a Texas law affect a resident of New York? Well, it is because they put in a provision, much like their abortion bill, that allows Texans to sue the social media giants for geographic discrimination. So if Meta tried to pull out of Texas this bill says Texans could sue them. Not unsurprisingly, platforms under 50 million users are exempt from these provisions so none of this affects Trump/far-right affiliated social platforms(Truth, GETTR, Gab, Parler, Rumble…).
So, as it dawns on society just how toxic and horrific it is to itself and how much damage the Trump presidency did to our judiciary that a judge allowed this bill to stand, our ability to change how we use social media platforms in response to these types of disruptions should be our biggest goal. As the leaked draft on the decision to overturn Roe v Wade shows, the Supreme Court and our judicial system no longer respect the role of precedent and the rule of law, and worse, they do not understand the technologies they are adjudicating. And while the Supreme Court stayed it this time, it should come to no shock to progressives that Justice Kegan joined the dissenters. The issue of free speech on platforms is ill understood by a court far removed from the technology they are trying to govern. It is a recipe for disaster, even if it was averted this time.
The future is uncertain and it will only continue to become more so, especially online. We must stay flexible and adaptable. Dare we say, “Nimble.”?. We must stay grounded in the fundamental organizing principles that have served us since the beginning of politics and adapt those principles “on the fly” to whatever platform we are using in the most efficient and effective ways we can.