How would Twitter describe its own relationship with the media?
With a poop emoji.
That was the company’s apparently official response to an emailed question from The Guardian. To be fair, it’s now the automated response to any query addressed to [email protected], like Elon Musk announced on sunday – presumably forcing many journalists to resist asking how he would describe himself.
It is not the first time that the CEO has handled the emoji with such eloquence. When offered a detailed explanation of why it would be difficult to estimate how widespread bots are on the platform, Musk responded with the same image last May by former Twitter chief Parag Agrawal. Twitter cited that response in its lawsuit seeking to force Musk to complete his purchase of the platform, prompting him to explain with trademark brevity that “💩 = BS.”
Why, exactly, does a 51-year-old man seem to be stuck in Freud’s anal stage? Psychoanalysts contacted by The Guardian seemed reluctant to weigh in, but this comes as no surprise to Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor of communication at the University of California, Davis. Musk, she says, is courting his followers using the language of populism.
It is “an indicator of this deeper trend of trivialization of public and political discourse in the United States,” Wojcieszak says. “One of the things about populist discourse and populist politicians or populist rhetoric is simplicity. It’s the appeal to common people, the anti-intellectualism, the anti-elitism.” That’s in line with Musk’s longtime persona as an unconventional businessman with a penchant for candor.
The emoji feeds an “us versus them” mentality, Wojcieszak notes: “the good, virtuous us, who we are, in the case of Donald Trump, for example, the true Americans, the patriots, and Musk is feeding that.” .” In the eyes of his allies, he is mocking “them,” the perceived leftists in universities and the media, who may never recover from their exposure to a cartoon image of eyed feces.
Musk’s own political affiliations can be hard to decipher; he has described himself as a centrist and expressed his support for both major American parties. As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times last year, “seems more strenuously anti-left than ideologically pro-right.” Still, his recent tweets and actions, including sitting down with Rupert Murdoch at the Super Bowl and displaying the gun on his nightstand, feel clearly aligned with conservatives.
That might not be bad for business, according to Wojcieszak. Before Twitter’s Muskification, many on the right perceived him to be biased against them. His attempts to own the libraries could be helping to win them back, even if he costs the platform some left-handed users. And because there are few alternatives to Twitter, Wojcieszak says, many of those who disagree with Musk have stuck around. Plus, even if liberals hate what he says, stunts like this get a lot of press attention, Wojcieszak notes. “Free coverage is good coverage,” she says.
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It’s unclear if his apparent strategy to win over new users is working. In November, about a month after Musk bought Twitter, independent research showed evidence of growth in the US, although the overall picture was murky. However, a study published in January showed a overall decline in US users – with Democrats giving up higher rates than either Republicans or Independents.
Should we expect other companies to follow Musk’s lead? Will Facebook respond to critical queries with an iron fist emoji? Will Sotheby’s use the vomit face? Will Amazon use a Jeff Bezos rocket gif? Everything is unlikely, says Wojcieszak.
“It’s very risky for most companies that can’t afford that kind of bold move,” he says. Musk can do it because he is very rich, “but also because he is not only a businessman, he is a public figure. So that generates publicity.”
