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Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/X howl-round about Peanut the squirrel. The house where Peanut lived was raided, and this blameless rescue-rodent euthanized, after a complaint was apparently filed to a government agency by a neighbor. And Peanut’s story went super-viral.
The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to ‘news’ can leave any or all of us riddled with bullets. Just ask Peanut
Rather than seeing it as a local hard-luck story, many social media users supposed this to be a paradigmatic instance of what was at stake in the election. This wasn’t human interest: this was front-page stuff. If they come for Peanut now, was the rough line of reasoning, they’ll come for you next: this is why the right to bear arms is so important.
Such was the outrage at the squirrel’s death that within a fraction of a news cycle, a name was put to the woman who had supposedly dobbed Peanut in. Her social media profiles were carpet-bombed and shortly after disappeared. Her name, face, address and place of work were widely and threateningly circulated.
Only yesterday, though, a large-follower account supplied a plot-twist: “It turns out she is innocent. An open records request proves [she] wasn’t the person who turned Peanut into authorities. Please help me clear her name by sharing this…” Oops. Many, be it said, were not convinced.
Personally, I have no idea if this woman signed Peanut’s death warrant or not — and even if she did I don’t think complaining about a squirrel warrants exposure to mob violence. That’s why, among other things, I don’t name her here. The acceptance of what we don’t yet know seems to me kind of important.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk was vaunting the truth-telling virtues of the platform on which all this was taking place. “You are the media now,” he has been tweeting repeatedly. He describes X as a “real-time source of truth” and an antidote to the “legacy media” — whom he accuses of misinformation and censorship. In his account of it, traditional newspapers, magazines and TV stations have been deservedly overtaken by the next generation of media: a collection of uncensored sovereign individuals, armed only with their passion and their First Amendment rights. Snobbish gatekeepers be damned.
The first thing to bear in mind about this ridiculous pronouncement is that when Elon Musk says the only media anyone now needs is X, he has skin in the game. More skin, in fact, than a World of Leather warehouse. The more people who use his platform, the better his already stupendous bank balance will look. If Rupert Murdoch got up and declared that the only newspaper anyone now needed to buy was the New York Post, you wouldn’t hail him as the visionary prophet of an epistemic shift in media consumption. You’d discount it as a tycoon transparently puffing his own business interests.
The second thing brings us back to dear old Peanut. It’s that the reporting model of X is radically different from the reporting model of the much-derided mainstream media — and that that is unequivocally a bad thing. The basic job of a reporter, as Nick Davies argued in his long-ago but prescient book Flat Earth News, is verification. The way news works is that you hear something, you put the work in to find out whether it’s true — and then, and only then, do you publish it. The X model is, avowedly and deliberately, to shoot first and ask questions later. Musk and his groupies think that “community notes” — whereby other users can add polite notes correcting mistakes after they’ve been made — is all the verification anybody needs.
Most of us, and especially the woman who was subjected to death threats and had fake bombs sent to her home after various citizen journalists decided she was responsible for the squirrel’s death and plastered her information over social media, would disagree. Further, the boring old MSM is accountable in a way that the average burner X account is not. If The Spectator libels you, you know where their offices are and you know the name of the editor. That will tend to concentrate the mind.
The Muskian concern for free speech is in some respects admirable. But it’s crude
Verification before publishing and accountability are the two principles on which “legacy media” of all stripes and all political persuasions have been built. That the instantiation of these principles is always and everywhere imperfect — that newspapers and television stations are guilty of bias, sloppy reporting and motivated reasoning — does not mean that the principles are worthless.
Don’t get me wrong. Crowdsourcing is great. It does give marginal voices the chance to be heard. And social media brings us information, in fast-moving situations, with marvelous speed and often (but not always) marvelous accuracy. When Wikipedia has been tested head-to-head for accuracy against Encyclopedia Britannica, it has tended to come out on top by some way. But the incentive structure of Wikipedia is not the same as the incentive structure of X.
You will find edit-wars in Wikipedia, trolls vandalizing pages, and many instances of bad-faith engagement and deliberate spin. But it rests on (and retains its relative accuracy over the long term because of) boringly old-school principles: if you want your “fact” to survive on Wikipedia for any length of time, you need to provide a credible source to back it up. And you can’t make a quick buck out of posting something untrue there.
Social media thrives, and monetizes, virality. Its currency is attention, not truth, and being interesting — which often means being shocking, or enraging, or more extreme than the next guy — is what gets clicks. The quick discharge of emotion is what drives social media. Crowdsourcing, then, may be a powerful tool — but if you don’t look under the bonnet at the incentive structure, you’re not comparing like with like. Elon Musk has no interest in looking under the bonnet, but the rest of us very much do.
The Muskian concern for free speech is in some respects admirable. But it’s crude. His stripe of self-declared free speech warriors either carelessly or deliberately conflate the freedom to make arguments with the freedom to invent facts. The traditional model — which is what MSM newspapers and television journalists of all political persuasions have subscribed to — has been pithily expressed in the maxim that facts are sacred and comment is free. That hasn’t become less true just because “facts are free too” makes Elon Musk richer. And the “marketplace of ideas,” which in Musk’s X is further distorted by opaque algorithms and a transparently pay-to-play business model, is not as abstract as it sounds, either — not when by the time a “community note” casts doubt on some eye-catching denunciation its victim can have lost their job or been caused to flee their home.
This isn’t a left/right issue, where I’m inveighing against the awfulness of MAGA trolls because I don’t like their politics. In the last few days the white supremacist Nick Fuentes (after gloatingly tweeting “Your body, my choice”) had his home address plastered all over X too. The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to “news” can leave any or all of us riddled with bullets. Just ask Peanut.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
