Important things that shouldn't matter

Elon Musk is buying Twitter. Or has already bought it. Or is in the process?

I'm honestly not sure because, like many people I'm sure, the words "Elon Musk has…" triggers an intense feeling of disinterest. One that is only amplified by the notion that Twitter should at all be taken seriously.

After all. It's just Twitter.

It wasn't so long ago that Twitter didn't even exist, and then in its early existence it was primarily a novelty for celebrities to self-promote. For years something being on Twitter was basically synonymous with being trivial. You don't put important things on Twitter. You put up dumb jokes, bad takes on movies, and get a small thrill when a bored D-list celebrity gives you the time of day by responding to, or even liking, something you said.

The idea of Twitter being a major platform for the dissemination of information is a relatively new phenomenon.

It's all too easy to dismiss Twitter as not being a platform of significance, but while many may wish that to be the case, that's no longer the reality. Like it or not, the platform has become a powerful entity that can, and has, made a dramatic impact on society.

I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but that doesn't make it untrue.

Which is why Musk's purchase of the company is so concerning. Not because I think he has any kind of nefarious agenda. The opposite, actually.

Musk is impulsive to a fault and continually demonstrates that he doesn't understand, or care, about the considerable power he already wields. This behavior got him sued for defamation a few years back, which he somehow managed to walk away from with a legal defense that boiled down to "LOL, JK."

Even just last week he decided to weigh in on a discussion about antidepressants and which ones should or shouldn't be on the market. Elon Musk is not a doctor, but he has 90 million followers. Even if only half of those followers are real people and not bots, that's still 45 million people that apparently think he's worth listening to.

Now, there is a train of thought that says that anybody dumb enough to take medical advice from some random guy on Twitter, whether it's Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, or somebody else, deserves what they get.

At the same time though, there is another train of thought that says that when you have the mass audience that they do, you bear some responsibility for what you put out there. Musk has consistently denied that responsibility.

And now he wants to control the entire Twitter platform.

It's hard to predict exactly how this will result in disaster, but it assuredly will. One of the world's richest men having direct control over one of the world's most powerful communication tools is an inherently dangerous situation and Musk has shown no indication that he has the discipline to not abuse that power.

None of this should matter. Neither Twitter nor Elon Musk should have the ability to impact society as much as they do. But they do.

With luck, the best case scenario is that they run each other into the ground.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and hopes Musk fires the guy that decided to make the Twitter timeline not chronological.