Elon Musk May Turn the Digital Town Square into a Colosseum

The world’s richest man could use Twitter to radically disrupt politics

Ten years ago, Google did something unprecedented for a giant tech company. It blacked out the landing page for search and replaced it with a call to action, urging people to email their elected representatives in Congress to stop legislation that Google feared would break the internet. It was part of a much bigger day of action against the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA/PIPA) that thousands of websites and organizations participated in, which ultimately resulted in an estimated 15 million calls, faxes and emails that melted down Congressional offices on both sides of the aisle and led to the quick withdrawal of the flawed legislation. Google alone channeled somewhere between two and three million of those email messages.

Since 2008, Facebook has been nudging its users to go vote, mainly by giving them a button to click showing that they’re voting and then showing that to their friends. A study by its research scientists revealed that in 2010, the “I’m Voting” button generated sufficient peer pressure to induce voter turnout up by more than half of one percent compared to the previous mid-term elections. In 2012, as I reported for Mother Jones, the company’s researchers…