The Untweeting

 

Well The Donald is now “permanently” banned from Twitter, and Apple and Google have quickly followed suit in banning some alternate social media apps from their respective stores. Many see this as some great moral victory, although for what greater good is unstated. I see it as a dangerous, short-sighted move that is going to backfire, but not in the ways many people think.

While I spend (too much) time on Facebook, I don’t have a Twitter account as anything worthwhile on Twitter finds its way into mainstream media, which is more an indictment on lazy reporting. But it wasn’t until two Christmases ago that I really understood the power of Twitter. At our neighbors’ holiday party, an investment banker admitted that he had no social media account and didn’t really pay attention to any of it.

Except for Twitter. This, he admitted, was the first thing he read getting out of bed.

Why, of all things, Twitter? As he explained, “I need to know what the President said first thing in the morning. It’s what the markets are following.” And there, in all its naked power, was why Twitter mattered, and how it had gotten completely out of control. It was also a story I had heard nearly 30 years ago when many of Big Tech’s employees were infants or not even born.

The story was in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, his book about Wall Street powerhouse Salomon Brothers. One particular hazing ritual was to ask the trainee class to quote the morning’s LIBOR rate. New to the industry, there was silence primarily because nobody knew what LIBOR was, and the few who did had no inkling as to why it was so critical first thing in the morning. Yelling and ranting at Marine drill sergeant levels ensued, and suffice it to say the mistake was never made again. And while the method may have been extreme, the message was clear: LIBOR was what the markets were following, and so you need to follow LIBOR.

Twitter, then, has reached the level where it is LIBOR of communication, and the problem is that those who run the company are in way over their heads. While “permanent” in the digital world is almost an oxymoron, banning Trump is the great public step in social media’s taking sides in the political debate. This won’t end well for the tech companies, primarily because they are utterly unable to take responsibility for any of their actions. In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, big tech is literally unblinking when they say their business is for the public good. To which I remind everyone that there are two options in life: clean up your act or the government will do it for you, and the latter is never the better choice.

Somewhere in Silicon Valley there’s a happy place where if the Democrats run everything, their businesses will be protected. By the paper width of a few ballots, some of questionable veracity, they got their way for now. And I wouldn’t bank on now lasting that long, and when it ends, the loss of Section 230 protections, among others, will be devastating. The bigger loss will be in talent and vision. At what point will the best and the brightest in engineering start looking elsewhere for unicorn paychecks? The point when it stops being engineering and starts to be a social movement, like banning a prominent public official. It’s the point where you are no longer what the employment market follows first thing in the morning.

What happens next? If I had to guess the finance folks at Twitter will take a long look at how banning Trump, and the loss of his followers, will affect the bottom line. You’ll know how that analysis went if Trump is reinstated because he “has agreed to reform his behavior” or some such nicety in the press release. But don’t look to Salomon Brothers or LIBOR for answers either. A few years after Liar’s Poker came out Salomon became embroiled in a scandal where they fixed the price of government bonds. The government does not look kindly at that, and Salomon was swiftly absorbed into another bank. And the paramount LIBOR? The banks colluded to fix that rate for years and it had to move to another exchange before it will be decommissioned in the next few years. Nothing may be forever, but for Jack Dorsey he might remember that Myspace was the dominant, unbreakable leader with money pouring in and talent beating down its doors. That is until it was gone in less time than it takes to type 280 characters.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.