That is an edition of The Atlantic Day by day, a newsletter that guides you thru the most important stories of the day, helps you discover recent ideas, and recommends the most effective in culture. Enroll for it here.
Updated at 9:00 p.m. ET on December 16, 2022
For the past few days, Elon Musk has been throwing a big temper tantrum on his platform, Twitter. It is just not often a matter of public interest when a narcissist like Musk goes haywire, but just as Donald Trump’s anger warped our public life, Musk’s conniptions could affect our culture and the way we get information.
But first, listed below are three recent stories from The Atlantic.
Calvinball
A variety of serious things are happening on this planet: economic uncertainty, war, a pandemic. What’s happening on Twitter isn’t even near those issues in importance or impact. However the continued reign of Elon Musk as Twitter’s chief jerk could, in actual fact, affect your life, in ways you would possibly not realize. But first, let’s review the events of the past 24 hours or so. In case you haven’t been on Twitter, you’ve been missing something just like the tech version of Desperate Housewives, but it surely’s necessary to grasp the claims Musk is making and why major news outlets are pushing back on them.
This whole drama might be rooted somewhere in Musk’s privileged youth or his bloated psyche, however the immediate spur to this most up-to-date mini-drama was that Musk doesn’t like people knowing the situation of his private jet. Jack Sweeney is a university student who used public data to trace the situation of Musk’s jet and plenty of others, including some owned by Russian oligarchs. He then posted this information on Twitter through a wide range of different accounts—all now suspended—including one dedicated to Musk, @ElonJet. Musk disliked this a lot that just about a 12 months ago, he offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing it.
Sweeney declined. Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October and, in a flurry of Calvinball rule changes, declared this week that revealing the whereabouts of his jet was similar to doxxing (that’s, publishing personal data about private residents), decreed this a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and banned the account.
Musk claims that a stalker used the situation of his jet to attack a automotive that his son was in. He has not presented any evidence that this event happened or, it seems, filed any police reports. And in a karmic plot twist, the founding father of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat tweeted that his team ascertained that the event didn’t happen near an airport. But Musk used this story to go after yet more accounts. None were sharing the real-time location of his jet, but some were reporting on the ban of @ElonJet and the Musk Twitter tantrum that went with it.
Inside hours, the account bans had piled up. Musk took out the independent journalist Aaron Rupar, an everyday thorn in his paw. He banned Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. He scragged the accounts of Drew Harwell at The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, and Ryan Mac of The Recent York Times. Because the night wore on, he vanished Keith Olbermann—sure, he’s annoying, but still—and Matt Binder of Mashable. And only for good measure, when Steve Herman of that notoriously left-wing organization generally known as Voice of America merely affirmed the news that Musk was banning his critics, the Chief Twit zotzed that account too.
The standard Twitter tempête de merde ensued. Twitter’s liberals swore that this was the last straw and that they were all decamping to alternatives, often the Mastodon social network. This really got Musk’s oddly shaped dander up, because, because it seems, Sweeney was over on Mastodon doing his usual flight tracking—and so Musk seemingly went through one other round of sweaty, offended panic, wherein Twitter declared references to Mastodon to be “unsafe,” eventually blocking links to Mastodon itself within the name of safety and virtue and all that’s holy and good—which can also be convenient, because Mastodon is one among Twitter’s few competitors.
Musk’s petty outbursts make you wonder how dangerous it will be if a narcissistic, self-interested, vindictive adolescent ever gained a serious political office reminiscent of, say, the White House. But I digress.
Now, unless you’re Very Online—and I’m, for each personal and skilled reasons—none of this matters very much in the meanwhile. But Musk’s weird rampage does have an effect on the best way the world around you exchanges information. Twitter has many levels; for some people, it’s a spot to speak about oddball hobbies and exchange pet pictures. (Have you ever met my cat?) However it’s also an especially priceless conduit for news, information, culture, and argument. Twitter doesn’t control the news, but it surely helps to shape public debate about many issues. Indeed, Musk’s entire public rationale for taking on Twitter was to preserve a crucial venue without cost speech.
Musk’s defense of free speech is nonsense. One among the world’s richest men—who is just not shy about his politics or his contempt for the free press—has reinstated Donald Trump, white supremacists, and any variety of dangerous malefactors to Twitter, but he has made it clear that Donie O’Sullivan is beyond the pale. He has purchased a crucial and influential piece of the general public square not to boost public debate, but to punish individuals who annoy him. As if to underscore this point, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces live audio chat with journalists who asked him to clarify what he was doing. He abruptly left the meeting—after which Twitter Spaces itself was shut down. (This was, he tweeted, to repair a “Legacy bug.” He announced on Friday evening that Spaces had been restored.)
I actually don’t subscribe to among the more nefarious theories about Musk’s motivations (nor will I share them). I believe he lost his cool because for greater than a month, he’s been in way over his head with an impulsive purchase, his fortunes are plunging, and he got booed by a crowd of 1000’s of individuals at a Dave Chappelle performance—which, for a man like Musk, might be an unforgivable injury from what ought to be an adoring public.
But we are able to a minimum of shelve all of Musk’s blather about free speech. Twitter is a crucial a part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now within the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child. That is yet one more step within the infantilization of American life, wherein we must accommodate and work across the behavior of grown men and ladies who not so way back would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work as a substitute of constructing a spectacle of themselves.
Related:
Today’s News
- In her first statement since being released from a Russian penal colony, Brittney Griner said on Instagram that she is now home and will probably be spending the vacations together with her family.
- Russia launched greater than 70 missiles at Ukraine, disrupting its power and water supplies.
- Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed federal prosecutors to finish sentencing disparities over the distribution of crack and powder cocaine.
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Why Doesn’t Every American Have a Robot Dog?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
There was a time when the little robot dog was amongst essentially the most coveted items on this planet.
From about 1999 to 2008, all kids needed to do was determine which little robot dog they longed for essentially the most. There have been so many unbelievable options. From the Canadian company WowWee, Mega-Byte the Hound Droid, which had a giant, blocky head and glowing eyes. From Mattel, Rocket the Wonder Dog, which “rocketed through space, time, and the Milky-Bone Galaxy in search of a loving home here on earth.”
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Pick something up from our 10 best books of the 12 months.
Or, when you’re within the mood to learn recent things, try one among these seven books that may make you smarter.
Watch. In theaters, Avatar: The Way of Water is proof that cinematic wonder still exists.
And when you’re watching the World Cup final on Sunday, attempt to consider the sport as a dance.
Listen. On our podcast Radio Atlantic, Mark Leibovich and Elaina Plott Calabro discuss what’s next for the GOP.
And the 10 best albums of 2022 show that the 12 months in music was a celebration.
P.S.
There’s plenty of talk on Twitter about where to go if Twitter implodes. I’ve already written about why I don’t just like the alternatives, but I’ll admit that I actually have arrange an account on Post and reactivated my old LinkedIn account (I’m very old-school) just in case Musk literally pulls his recent toy’s power cord out of the wall.
However it’s Friday, so let’s take into consideration something more nice. Musk, as I noted, is playing Calvinball, a game designed by a fictional 6-year-old that has no real rules. This jogged my memory that it was 27 years ago this month that the comic-strip genius Bill Watterson ceased writing Calvin and Hobbes. You’ll be able to see the very last panels here, with the mixture of artwork and wonder that made the strip so beloved over its too-brief life. I still remember seeing the first Calvin and Hobbes in The Washington Post in 1985, after I had just moved to D.C. from Boston. I used to be young, broke, and greater than a little bit homesick, but I remember laughing and being hooked immediately. So don’t let the world get you down: Daydream about being Spaceman Spiff while Miss Wormwood drones on, after which get outside and check out to bean that silly Susie Derkins with a snowball. There are multiple compilations of Calvin and Hobbes, and when you know someone who’s never experienced the strip, now’s an excellent time to introduce them to a much better child than Elon Musk.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this article.
Correction: This text originally misidentified the Mashable reporter Matt Binder.
