Nov 2, 2022 4 min read

How social is social media?

Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, gives a clear answer to that question. Musk made the platform – a public square – his own boiling cauldron of hate just in time for Halloween.

Double blows to American democracy occurred overnight, within hours of each other. It seems a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

Enter the ghoulish Musk. He doesn’t need a costume.

Then Paul Pelosi, 82, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, is almost murdered in his bed in their San Francisco home. He resembles good Duncan, the first to die by blood in Macbeth.

In the first act, a convergence of these events happened in real time.

Musk took an unspeakably ugly lie – which I won’t repeat – about the Pelosi crime and retweeted it as a “tiny possibility.”

Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, makes the robber barons look good.

This lie was “amplified” a thousandfold. If the new boss showed “fair is foul and foul is fair,” then waging more war on the Speaker in an hour of grief was open season.

We in the press are cast in the play as truth-tellers. Yet we miss a lot, like the Jan. 6 plot.

Our job is not just to breathlessly report tweets. Journalism words like “misinformation,” “accountable” and “baseless” are just jargon, way too weak for the alarming cascade of vile abuse heaped on public figures.

The would-be political assassin demanded, “Where’s Nancy?”

The Speaker was in San Francisco shortly beforehand, at a Golden Gate National Recreation Area celebration. She had departed for Washington, thank goodness. Days before, the Speaker visited Croatia, keeping the busiest schedule under the sun.

I cover her, unflappable under fire. But this outrageous attack, hitting home, broke her heart.

It shocked and cracked hearts of all decent people, that the venom Speaker Pelosi gets turned into violence again.

The Jan. 6 mob stormed the Capitol and shouted her name in the crypt. All they forgot was pitchforks.

Pro-Trump extremist groups like the Oath Keepers became organized and radicalized on the internet. Oath Keepers marched into the Capitol in military gear to overturn the presidential election by force for the first time. The armed throng scaled the steps and terrace.

The latest attack shattered a sense of safety, even complacency, about the harm social media does to us. Yes, we make new friends who are sorry when our dog dies – but at what cost to our collective soul?

Does our obsession bring out the best or worst in the American character? Dependence on devices and friends, known and unknown, deepened during the pandemic.

I can tell you one thing. The darkness festering in social media is not what First Amendment author James Madison meant by free speech. He considered it enlightening exchanges for the health of our body politic – not the present tense “dis-coarse.”

One Louisiana Republican, Rep. Clay Higgins, was particularly pitiless in a tweet (deleted) aimed at the Pelosis. No surprise, Donald Trump Jr. sent a trash tweet that never should have made print or air.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California lifted a finger to send a text to the Speaker.

Meanwhile, before our eyes, Twitter became a pitched battle, an ethereal Gettysburg.

Major names debated, as Dan Rather put it, should I stay or go? I love what the 91-year-old news sage has to say every day, but I can’t stay long.

Saudi Arabia is the second largest shareholder in Twitter. The cruel desert kingdom is a dealbreaker for me. Friends and foes, see you on the other side.

John Dean of Watergate infamy bemoaned losing a thousand followers: “I enjoy comments from my followers, so I find this disquieting.”

Yes, that’s the real tragedy.

Political sage Norm Ornstein is reluctant to leave the site for other reasons. He found a vast community of friends with whom he could share life’s vicissitudes and “fulminate about evil and injustice.”

I’ll miss Norm most when I go. He’s generous with his ocean of knowledge about Congress and circulates “great stuff by others.”

Ornstein told his circle (over 229,000) of concerns for democracy in coming days: “But I’ll stay. For now.”

The offstage villain of the play still breathes free air. For now.

Jamie Stiehm is a nationally syndicated columnist. He may be reached at JamieStiehm.com.