wild turtle doves

Facebook’s promise to “bring the world closer together” and Twitter’s self-mythology as a “global town square” are marketing exercises that borrow democratic prestige to dignify websites concerned with generating revenue and directing the herd. When Facebook built a tool that it suggested employers could use to suppress labor organizing content, or deployed algorithms that systematically steered vulnerable users toward extreme content, or promoted content that helped to spur the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, the platform was performing as expected. When Elon Musk started visibly boosting ideological allies (read: amateur phrenologists and spurned lovers of apartheid), apparently suppressing enemies, and seemingly adjusting algorithms by whim, he was not corrupting some neutral edifice. He made the governance question legible to people who’d preferred not to see it. The landlord had always been there.