Meanwhile, the public-square metaphor kept gaining popularity. Picked up by politicians and even the Supreme Court, it was an acknowledgment of the increasing importance of social media in public discourse. But despite Costolo’s vision, Twitter serves less as a town square than as a gladiatorial arena. It’s where competitors kill off one another while the crowd cheers, where teams compete in winner-take-all contests, where unending ideological demolition derbies go in circles. It’s where the spectacle lives, where attention can be captured, where people can be activated, because Twitter’s infrastructure has delivered a perpetually roiling crowd; to be on Twitter is to fight on Twitter, and often to fight about Twitter..
Since the advent of more active content moderation on Twitter and other online platforms, the prototypical public square has been retconned—particularly by Musk’s supporters in the United States—into a haven for absolute free speech. This is not accurate. The real public square has always been moderated. Public-nuisance laws and noise ordinances have long placed restrictions on the time, place, and manner of expression protected by the First Amendment. Try to get a group of 100 ideological allies together to follow someone around a public park in the center of town shrieking at them, and see how that plays out.
The public-square metaphor places wholly unrealistic expectations on what social media is, or should be. We have never had even a national public square, let alone a global one, because communities and cultures differ on what norms and values should shape their common spaces. Twitter has spent years struggling to develop content-moderation rules that mitigate the worst harms while maximizing free expression, even as governments around the world weigh in with highly specific demands. It may simply be that when networks grow past a certain size, they become unmanageable.
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