Social Media vs. Social Skills

 Social media are anti-democratizing as voters do not have the social skills to communicate cooperatively face-to-face, let alone online.

 Voters need rigidly ritualized social interactions. They need a finite list to choose from, a menu, and they simply choose the one they like best. They need these rituals drilled into them by rote. Call and response pairs. In America, rituals are not drilled into them. They end up lost and confused. This is why they like parroting journalists: it's a Schelling point. Desperately grasping a piece of flotsam, because they can't see any land to stand on.

 On the internet, communication is harder. The interlocutor is likely a stranger with different rules, body language is lost, tone is lost, etc. To communicate successfully requires doing so in a way that acknowledges that not only are they not your best friend you've known for 15 years, but that you have no idea what their background is.

 Which raises the question: why would anyone with 99%+ social skills bother with social media? (Are they sending their best? Is Revenge Sour?) Why wouldn't they dominate their local social scene instead? Much higher potential, more immediate rewards. Even if you have the skills to communicate on a web forum, you won't find anyone who you can equally partner up with. In the unlikely event they tried at all, they've already seen it's a hellscape and quit.

 At most e.g. JBP does not read the replies to his tweets (or even read what he's writing down). At most he uses these things to communicate with folks he can talk to anyway, but does it publicly for some reason. [Parasocial] means [parasitic] or simply [deviant].
 Elon Musk, contrary to appearances, does not have a twitter account. He never says anything on it. You cannot talk to him through it, unless you can already talk to him through other means. Musk in fact has no idea what free speech means and can no more support free speech than a cargo cultist can build a working rocket. Maybe he just really really hated the idea of being banned, to the tune of $40 billion. Perhaps it was a long con: he saw that anti-rocket politicians were organizing on twitter, so he bought it to disrupt their organization. If he can also prevent some of his friends from being banned, that's merely a nice bonus. 

 Theoretically it is possible to use social media for communication. In practice, it can only be used for social violence. Reputational vandalism, and ostracism, and even then, only very marginally. ("What about ads?" "I already said violence.") Insofar as twitter has ever been useful, it is due to authors making mistakes. Noise in the system.