Twitter, Musk and Rule by Tweet

I’ve never had a Twitter account and never will.

Why? I’ve had four careers: scientist, lawyer, law professor, and now (in my dotage) blogger. In none of them did I ever dream I could write more than a wisecrack in 280 characters. That’s too short for even abstracts of most serious papers.

You might think, with Shakespeare, that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Maybe so. But “wit” is not far from “wisecrack.” And for all his verbal brilliance, Shakespeare was neither a government leader nor a scientist. He was smart enough to see that 280 characters are too few to discuss the kinds of vexing, interdisciplinary practical problems that people in high places routinely debate on Twitter today.

Perhaps the problem is not the bare concept of Twitter, but its overuse and misuse. It might be fine for stand-up comics testing one-liners. For serious discussion of complex practical problems in the public sphere, it falls short. At least it consistently oversimplifies and misleads. In operation, it’s like reporting on a twenty-minute, nuanced, multi-topic speech with a thirty-second sound bite.

It doesn’t take many words to say “Stop the Steal!” So Twitter is perfect for lies, misinformation, innuendo and conspiracy theories. There the bare claim is all; nuance, contrary evidence, thinking and sound judgment are not encouraged.

Readers’ online comments on news articles are similar. Though the Washington Post allows up to 2,000 characters, the vast majority of the comments I have read—I would say well over 95%—are wisecracks. They contain no facts, no reasoning, no nuance, no subtlety, and no complexity. They often contain no information about anything other than the writer. Many are verbal selfies less than 100 pixels wide.

Tweets are like that. They remind me of the “chops” that we kids used to hurl at each other as just-post-pubertal adolescents on my junior-high-school playground. Yet now supposedly serious people are using them to discuss serious public issues and even to govern us. No wonder our polity is beginning to resemble Lord of the Flies! (That’s a novel that leaves children to govern themselves. Spoiler alert: the outcome is not pretty.)

Elon Musk’s current trial in San Francisco illustrates the problem. There are reasons why our securities laws are longer than a Tweet. There are reasons why investment materials are, too. Investing is a serious and multifaceted business. The risks and rewards to be considered are many. And as the rote warning tells us, “past performance is no guarantee of future success.”

But Elon Musk sought to short-circuit all this with his now-famous Tweet. It implied (some would say boldly stated) that his taking Tesla private with big Middle Eastern money was in the bag. But the private purchase never happened. Investors who bought on his Tweet lost money. Some of them, apparently, were professionals, and they were not amused. They sued.

A big civil judgment against Musk for securities-law violations might teach us all a lesson. The convenience of Tweeting doesn’t justify ignoring the laws and customs of an industry developed over decades to protect ordinary people, in this case investors. (I think Musk himself is too far gone and too rich ever to learn a lesson from a mere rap on his knuckles. But the rap might inform others vicariously.)

Musk’s best legal defense may be to claim that his internal teenager got the best of him. He just wanted to broadcast a verbal selfie and have all the world admire him. He never expected anyone to act on it. Whether any sane juror would believe that defense remains to be seen.

Musk is not alone in seeming to Tweet before engaging his brain or his moral compass (if any), or consulting a lawyer. Our über-Narcissist ex-president used Tweets the way Roman emperors used to post edicts in the Forum. He made public pronouncements. He tried to make law, bypassing all the machinery of Congress, our regulatory agencies and our Constitution. He skirted rules and customs for making and publishing executive orders. He even fired high officials by Tweet, as if on his fictional TV show, “The Apprentice.” Sometimes he had to backtrack because his Tweets violated or skirted the law.

The public (or a huge minority of it) ate this up with a spoon. But unfortunately, there’s a little thing about human psychology. It’s called “delayed gratification.” This term denotes an individual’s ability and inclination to delay getting an immediate reward in order to serve a more distant or more important goal.

Psychologists test it in kids with the “two-piece-of-candy” test. They put a three-year old with basic understanding of language alone in a room, in front of a small table. An adult tester comes in and puts a piece of candy on the table, then says, “I’m going out for a while. If you haven’t eaten that piece of candy when I get back, I’ll give you another, and then you’ll have two.” It’s a simple, practical test of a kid’s ability to delay gratification for a large goal.

Researchers have followed the education, careers and family histories of kids in these tests for forty years. They found that, on average, the kids who delayed gratification (by waiting for the second reward) did better on every measure of human success: education, marriage, family, career, lifetime earnings, health, even basic stuff like staying off drugs and out of jail. The researchers concluded that the ability to delay gratification helps people succeed in virtually every measure of achievement and the good life.

So now comes Twitter. By design, it discourages delayed gratification. It beckons an industrialist like Musk with a way to circumvent the securities laws. It bids presidents, governors and senators to circumvent the Constitution and rule by Tweet. It seduces journalists to forget sourcing and nuance and blurt out whatever first comes to mind, just to get the “scoop,” or to bet their careers on that thirty-second sound bite.

Twitter goads everyone from teenagers to Musk and the President of the United States to Tweet first and think later—circumspection, laws and even entrenched customs be damned. We all feel the dopamine-rush of seeing our names in print and our “thoughts” on line, right away, without second thoughts or delayed gratification. What could possibly go wrong?

So in Musk’s San Francisco courtroom, it’s not he on trial so much as Twitter and its exploding misuse. I hope the court makes him pay big time. Otherwise, the disease of grown men and women acting like teenagers, abandoning thought and caution and ignoring rules and customs, will continue to metastasize with the Internet’s “Warp Speed.”

One of humanity's greatest achievements in communication could yet infect our best and brightest—and our most powerful—with a habit of shooting from the hip. If that habit ever makes its way to the nuclear button, we as a species are done.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post