Twitter — or X if you must — is essential for bypassing traditional institutions
At the time of writing, the British Government is apparently preparing legislation that many expect will lead to Twitter, formally known as “X”, being blocked. Officially this is because the platform’s in-built AI language model allows users to manipulate images of third parties so it appears that they are wearing nothing but lingerie. Yet critics, including the US government, regard it as a thinly-disguised attempt to censor a primary forum of opposition. Either way, millions of people across the country are now faced with the horrifying — and, for many, unprecedented — prospect of actually having to do their jobs in order to stave off boredom.
For the large majority of the population however, the idea of banning the social media site is a complete non-issue. Supposedly, around 40 per cent of British adults access the platform monthly, but this figure seems implausibly high. Most prefer one or more of either Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. Since it was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter must have seemed to those who don’t use it to have been nothing but trouble. Those still relying on the BBC or the papers for their news have been drip-fed continuous stories about “misinformation” and online abuse.
Reporters, producers, editors and directors positively live on the site
What the broadcasters and the newspapers won’t tell their viewers and readers, however, is that their reporters, producers, editors and directors positively live on the site. The stories that they decide to chase are based on things they see on Twitter, and the sources of information that determine their understanding of the issues come from things they are exposed to by their choice of followers on Twitter. To an increasing extent, they owe their jobs to the reputations they have built by their presence on Twitter — and, to a vastly underestimated extent, their editorial positions are shaped by the anticipated response of their audiences on Twitter.
Over the last few decades, as socio-economic class has declined as the primary indicator of individual politics in Britain, much has been made of emerging demographic fault lines. The most important seems to be age, or at least birth cohort, but younger men and women are apparently diverging from one another as well. We also have graduate vs non-graduate, and home-owner vs renter. Yet perhaps the most important political dividing line that exists in British politics today is that between Twitter-user and non-Twitter user. It might not determine which party people vote for, but there is an entire world of debate going on that even relatively well-informed people who are not on the site are completely oblivious to. Most of this is ephemera and trivia that is quickly forgotten, but the extent to which it forms the drumbeat to which the government marches would shock the average voter.
To most people, this might seem like all the more reason to get rid of it. People with serious jobs, governing the country and reporting the news, should not be transfixed by a website, and if decisions are being sculpted in an environment made up of a minority of “extremely online” malcontents rather than the broader electorate, then that would appear to be anti-democratic. Despite being part of that small share, I sympathise with this view — but voters and the public should also be aware of the vast extent to which the site has enhanced transparency, facilitated public debate over issues that were previously handled by a narrow cast of insiders, and allowed the flow of information between specialists who previously had limited chance to interact with one another.
Twitter is the primary social media platform that facilitates the flow of information between individuals who are otherwise unknown to one another in real life. Naturally, much of this is either nonsensical or ephemeral, and some of it may be considered outright deleterious to the public good. Still, it is, by some margin, the largest and most advanced tool humanity has yet conceived of to aggregate and share intelligence. Certainly, no other social media platform comes close to serving this purpose. Facebook tends to restrict users to the same narrow circle of people they already know in real life anyway, LinkedIn cultivates the same guardedness as exists in the workplace, Instagram is geared toward self-expression and entertainment, and TikTok is full of kids.
Perhaps the most critical aspect of Twitter in our politics is that it has allowed independent commentators and citizen journalists to pursue stories that traditional media have been reluctant to dwell on. This has been especially the case since Elon Musk’s takeover, after which the algorithmic and regulatory weighting which previously made the site mirror the sensibilities of prestige media were recalibrated. This point has been made so often lately that it has come to sound somewhat clichéd, but it remains true, no matter how much established media outlets and the centre-left hate it.
The rape gang story was not kept out of the public eye by conspiracy, but by a mixture of institutionalised over-sensitivity, politically motivated reticence, and self-censorship that was culturally ingrained into public services and the media as a result of the types of people who worked in them, and the balance of risk and reward they were subject to. This story is by far the most serious to have been amplified this way, but there are many more like it. Twitter allowed people to circumvent the gatekeepers — exposing the crimes to the general public as well as to an international audience.
Twitter gives space for stories which would previously never have seen the light of day to circulate and be tested by those who would wish to disprove them. On some occasions, they can begin to take on a life of their own, as public figures weigh in or embarrass themselves as they attempt to address them. This reduces the reputational risk to established outlets in reporting them, as they can merely be seen to cover the emerging controversy, rather than be the ones to break a story themselves. On other occasions, broadcasters are eventually forced to report on stories they find embarrassing or uncomfortable because of the amount of attention they are gaining from Twitter, and as they begin to spread to more mainstream audiences on Facebook and Instagram, via WhatsApp.
All recent British governments have struggled to adapt to this new dynamic, but the current administration seems especially hapless. Really, this ought to be expected, given that its inclinations go almost diametrically against the grain of present trends in British political thought. Starmer and his comrades continuously do things that are very obviously — comically, farcically obviously — going to be hated by the public. These include letting hardened criminals out of prison early while locking people up for Facebook posts, paying tens of billions to a foreign country in order to hand over British territory, and cancelling elections and jury trials. I could go on and on.
Decades of over-indulgence in post-modern ideas about the power of language and narrative, and a residual belief in the false consciousness of the masses, means that many Labour types instinctively blame their unpopularity on the public square being controlled by their opponents. It is true that Elon Musk has quite openly defined himself in opposition to almost everything Labour now stands for. But a government can hardly oppose the facilitation of data about its controversies and its unpopular ambitions — unless, that is, it wants to overtly embrace authoritarianism.
Yet this is not only about controversial stories. Twitter now stands in for a huge amount of the basic work that journalism used to entail. Where an earlier generation of reporters would once have kept an extensive address book of sources and contacts whom they would have kept in touch with periodically, by phone or by post, or at the even at the bar of certain pubs, now it is Twitter where rumours swirl and the modern reporter keeps his or her ear to the ground. Whilst this may represent a degree of laziness, it is enormously more efficient and allows reporters to follow more individuals and keep tabs on their musings on a far more regular basis. When they get wind of a potential story, they immediately have ready access to a far larger pool of targets with whom they can follow up and corroborate details.
This phenomenon is by no means restricted to journalists. Across every sphere — from academia, law, finance, medicine to the arts and education, and across every conceivable shade of professional, private or political interest — thousands of networks of individuals have been forged as a result of this one website. It has fostered discussion, exposed critical points of disagreement, and shone a light on gaps in our collective understanding. And this has been done in the full sight of any interested member of the public. Twitter has created millions of new synapses in the collective brain of the nation, and it has tied the nation into the hive mind of the world.
In doing so, it may well have shut off previous nodes of connection, as people stopped relying on older means of connection and of casual intelligence gathering. We are now being forced to contend with the idea of it suddenly not being there; even if the government doesn’t go through with its implicit threat to shut it off on this occasion. If in the future, some other authoritarian government closes it down, or if it is shut down as a result of technological failure, all of those millions of synapses would be lost in the blink of an eye. It would be the collective equivalent of a stroke.
A ban on Twitter in Britain would be an embarrassing and sordid milestone in our national elite’s descent into paranoia and authoritarianism
Twitter may have been so effective as a means of exchanging information that it has now become a single point of failure. If the government does follow through on its threat to have the site blocked in Britain, the lights will go out on our ability to hold it to account. Not only will we once again be dependent on gatekeepers in establishment media to determine which stories see the light of day, but the gatekeepers themselves will largely find themselves in the dark, having forgotten traditional mechanisms of information gathering. We’ve had a foretaste of this recently in the weakness of our main news outlets in covering the protests in Iran, or the sectarian violence in Syria in 2025. Lacking reporters on the ground, and unable to verify the stories coming out of the country, broadcasters seem reluctant to say anything at all.
A ban on Twitter in Britain would be an embarrassing and sordid milestone in our national elite’s descent into paranoia and authoritarianism about the free exchange of views and opinions. It would poison our relationship with the United States, where alarm at Britain apparently turning its back on what they believed was a shared commitment to free speech is by no means limited to the radical right. However, we should take this opportunity to consider the extent to which public life has become over-exposed to a single provider, and what we would do if it vanished for any other reason. We could do with a back-up.
