I'm the Reason Elon Killed Twitter

New battlefield. Same old class war.

The bird app was real power for regular people. That’s why it had to die.

I joined Twitter in 2009 but I didn’t “really” join until the shit-fan collision of 2016 when a significant chunk of America’s apathetic masses began to realize the true cost of their giant orange mistake.

I was teaching at the time, and had been politically active a time or two, but for the most part, I wasn’t much different from the rest of my lefty friends – mad about Bernie getting shafted, slightly vindicated by the chaos, etc. It’s a backstory right out of activist central casting.

I moved my writing away from academia and into the mainstream and started tweeting. Over time, I developed an audience, and after a piece or two caught on, tweets started getting traffic. I started gathering followers with names I recognized – journalists, actors, politicians, and even a couple of WWE wrestlers. Occasionally, I engaged with people whose influence outweighed mine in massive ways, and in this time, I also enjoyed a couple of truly viral moments. The little noises I made on my keyboard were being amplified in ways I never imagined. And the same thing was happening for millions of other regular Americans just like me.

This tweet is from the day when the Senate chose not to impeach

I had a voice. That’s what I’m getting at. I was just a flyover guy unknown by all but a few students, and I was able to develop real power, for that is what influence is when properly understood. And being a guy who argues for a living, I understood it well.

That influence led me to run for office. In my district, I was a blue dot in a red sea, but I ran well, beat up my opponent on stage multiple times, and moved my district by double digits in that election cycle. From the classroom to the bird app to fighting the good fight in the public square – all because I had a voice that was amplified in ways that make the rich very uncomfortable.

And that is why Elon bought and then dismantled Twitter (or rather, why he was sent to dismantle it), because that kind of power to make change, spread across masses of regular folks all over the world, it simply had to be stopped. When a guy like me can send a six-word message that hits 13 million screens, that is just too much power for the rich to allow little people to possess, and I was just one of millions of regular people who managed to sow influence on Twitter and reap real and sustainable power. For the rich, $44 billion was a small price to pay to silence their biggest critics.

This tweet was seen by over 13 million people. Working-class people are not permitted to possess that kind of power. It had to be stopped.

I was certainly one of those critics, and while I once enjoyed a viral moment every 60 days or so, these days, my posts have been throttled to the point I had to delete my account. Even those who asked the app to show them my posts didn’t end up seeing them. Elon did what he set out to do, and millions of amplified voices have since gone quiet.

While the cable news shows bemoan the loss of their journalistic easy button, the real story is not in the fact that Twitter is no longer a viable source for news, or that the white power contingent of the internet now gets special treatment there, or that “free speech” has now become a bastardized Citizens United version of itself. The real story is the newly voiceless, the folks who started quiet, got really loud, and are now silent again no matter how much they shout. They are why Twitter had to die.

We are why Elon Musk killed Twitter.

Now, Twitter is just like any other right-wing destination. It is a place flooded with falsehoods and fascism, a place where the biggest lie gets the most traffic and where conflict merchants on the right and left alike dance to the tune played by one of the six corporations that own over 90% of American media.

If the wealth class is going to keep stealing from us, messages like this one can’t be allowed to reach people.

And those who would do something about it, who did something about it before, well … we’re all tweeting to ourselves these days.

For years now, several different Twitter alternatives have popped up, and they have been competing against each other to be its replacement, but none have developed even a shred of Twitter’s former reach and power. And folks like me, while we have been able to cobble together some form of influence since the bird app died, few if any would claim to be as influential as we were before. It’s like having a race car only to have it taken away and replaced with a bicycle – I can still get where I want to go, but it’s a lot harder now.

So as Elon promises change and creates his own political party to make that change happen, be aware of what he’ll do with any additional power he is given. Elon Musk has done more to silence free speech in America than any human being in history. Of all the billionaires that hate the working class, I believe Elon Musk hates us the most.

Railroad tycoon Jay Gould once famously said “I can always hire one half of the working class to murder the other half.” And he was correct because half of us were always willing to take the job.

And when Elon makes us the same offer, as he is clearly doing now, we need to turn him down.

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Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.

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