The Twitter-Monopoly Myth

Q uite how the current drama will end remains, to say the least, unclear, but Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter will leave the social-media landscape a different place. Dissatisfied with a censorship-prone status quo, a critical mass of Americans wanted more-permissive content moderation, and Musk, his second thoughts over the acquisition notwithstanding, responded. These developments are a reminder to would-be regulators on the right that market forces usually fix market failures — sufficient demand will provoke innovation.

Conservative advocates of heavy-handed social-media regulations that violate property rights and the First Amendment should reverse course. It’s disappointing to see so many right-wingers advocating the use of state power to control (and sometimes simply punish) social media.

The pro-regulation Right should eschew the traditionally leftist assumption that popularity implies monopoly. They should stop arguing in a way that suggests that today’s social-media giants will never lose their market shares, an assumption that ignores basic economics. Incumbents, even purported monopolists, tend to lack staying power. Indeed, in any facet of life — business, politics, art, sports, etc. — perpetual performance in the top percentiles is close to impossible.

In 1998, Fortune declared the “Net-besotted, Yahoo!ing-their-brains-out, twenty- and thirty-something Web surfers” of Yahoo the victors of the “search-engine wars,” extolling their “near-flawless execution and brilliant marketing [that] eviscerated the competition.” Google launched that same year.

In 2000, Wired reported that competitors begged the Federal Communications Commission to foist interoperability — the capability to interact with other companies’ apps — on AOL’s instant messenger, bemoaning the now-forgotten tech company’s “monopoly.” In 2007, a Guardian column worried that MySpace might never lose its market share because it’s a “natural monopoly.”

Such alarmism continues today. Meta, another supposed immortal, is showing signs of decline as its revenues shrink. And as this article was drafted, Meta had tumbled more than 65 percent on the NASDAQ year-to-date, down to about $112 per share. What’s more, the company just terminated 13 percent of its staff — more than 11,000 employees. Meta isn’t kaput, of course, but its recent struggles undermine the narrative that current social-media incumbents are predestined for a thousand-year reign.

Many would-be regulators also overestimate the size of Twitter’s user base. Trump-appointed judge Andrew Oldham, for instance, in a recent opinion upholding a GOP-driven Texas law that banned viewpoint-based content moderation, called Twitter a “monopolist” — a view echoed by left-wing pundits. But Twitter doesn’t even crack the top five social-media platforms in the United States.

According to Pew Research data for 2021, fewer than one in four Americans used Twitter, which ranked seventh in overall popularity, well behind leaders YouTube (81 percent) and Facebook (69 percent). Even Pinterest (31 percent) and LinkedIn (28 percent) are more widely used. What’s more, over 95 percent of Twitter’s content is produced by only a quarter of its users. In total, Twitter has 206 million daily active users — Facebook (including Facebook Messenger) has nearly two billion.

The facts notwithstanding, many on both left and right have come to see Twitter as America’s “public square,” its fate inextricably linked with that of American democracy, an argument that Musk himself has essentially endorsed and that may come back to haunt him.

Such thinking comes from the fact that, heavily trafficked by politicians and media members, Twitter punches well above its weight in American culture. Likes and retweets fly, partisans clash, and echo chambers echo — all fueled by a small, hyperpartisan, disproportionately elite user base. In short, Twitter only appears to be the essence of American politics to those whose perceptions are perpetually filtered through it.

The platform is like a country club (a private space, incidentally) where members confer and bicker with each other and go home believing they understand the sentiments of their community at large. And since Twitter’s users are generally the nation’s loudest and most visible political voices, they can plausibly pitch it to the rest of the nation as the true embodiment of American political discourse. But it’s a bubble: the real Real America isn’t on the platform.

Allowing the market time to correct itself can be stressful, but more government involvement may actually extend incumbents’ lifespan. Regulations and their associated compliance costs generally hamstring small upstarts and favor large, established businesses that have the excess resources needed to navigate regulatory hurdles — which may explain some of Mark Zuckerberg’s eagerness to be regulated.

Healthy democratic societies promote free speech in culture as well as in law, and, even if they are entitled to do so (a private space is a private space), today’s social-media magnates should certainly not be so keen to resort to censorship — just consider their treatment of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid-19 lab-leak theory, the Babylon Bee, or the phenomenon of “jawboning” generally. But neither should those on the right abandon principles of limited government and ignore the lessons of history and economics. And remember, despite the protestations of click-drunk partisans, the Twitter experience is no sacrament of democracy.