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 experimented with increasing how much “hard news” its prioritized on the news feeds of nearly two million American adults, finding that 67% of the people in this group reported voting that fall, compared to just 64% in a control group who weren’t shown more hard news.

Ever since tech collided with politics, a handful of us have worried that companies with giant platforms might use their ability to directly engage millions of users at once to tilt the political process to their personal benefit. For the most part, the companies have been relatively restrained in using their platform power. After the SOPA/PIPA fight was over, Google did nothing with the email list it had suddenly accumulated, even though those two or three million people could have been converted into a grassroots lobby for internet freedom. For years, Facebook tried to keep itself neutral in the political arena (even though its “I’m Voting” button undoubtedly tipped Democratic turnout more, since its user base was more female and urban than the general population). Then turned itself into knots as soon as conservatives realized they could arm-twist Mark Zuckerberg by claiming its news feed was biased against rightwing content. Smaller platforms have sometimes been more brazen, most notably Uber, which bullied New York City into allowing the company to swamp the city with drivers by adding a button to its app for local users showing how “[Mayor] de Blasio’s Uber” would result in long wait times or no cabs at all. And lots of companies have tapped their user bases to try to get them to lobby lawmakers on their behalf, something my friend and colleague Matt Stempeck has tracked for years on his “UserLobbying” Tumblr blog.

But here’s why Elon Musk owning Twitter is different and potentially a lot more disruptive. Once the acquisition is done, Twitter will be wholly owned by one private individual. All the other big tech platforms have powerful CEOs, but even Mark Zuckerberg, who has majority ownership of Meta, answers to a board and provides quarterly reports to shareholders. The only people who might restrain Musk at Twitter are its employees and its users. Early signs suggest that while many Twitter employees are worried about their new boss, a lot are also hungry for direction (and also worried in more practical ways about what is going to happen to their stock options). Musk may lose some, but I suspect a lot will be delighted to keep working for him. As for Twitter’s 200 million daily active users, so far there are hints of prominent progressives losing some followers and leading conservatives gaining some, but no massive shift.

What will Musk do with such a giant platform? And how might that affect our democracy? Two days ago, as the Twitter board was voting to accept his offer, Musk tweeted, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.” Tech policy experts are already pushing back on these ideas, arguing that Musk is underestimating the need for content moderation and warning that forcing all users to authenticate their identities will squelch vital kinds of anonymous or pseudonymous speech.

I think those critics are right to be worried about those things, but I suspect Musk may use Twitter in ways that may fundamentally challenge our assumptions about democracy itself. For if he believes that Twitter is the “digital town square,” he may very well decide to actually turn it into one. Imagine a new Twitter landing page that asks users to weigh in on the news of the day, or legislation pending before Congress, or President Biden’s latest move in the Ukraine crisis. Or whether a particular user should be banned or reinstated. Daily plebescite by tweet is just the beginning. Imagine if after registering your opinion with a “like” you are then invited to click through to tell the target of attention how you feel about what they’re doing. And imagine a scoreboard that shows users how those targets are responding. With nearly 75 million Twitter users in the United States, Musk could convert the platform into a real-time Roman Colosseum.

This may be an outlandish fantasy, and Musk is probably too busy and distracted to push anything like it. He just needs Twitter to keep its advertisers happy in order to make money, after all. But the man is audacious enough to do something like this. He loves to use Twitter’s polling feature. A few years ago, he toyed with creating a site “where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication,” which he said he would call Pravda. A year ago, he changed his Twitter bio to read: “Technoking of Tesla, Imperator of Mars,” the latter a title Julius Caesar demanded the Roman Senate give him. Once Twitter is in Musk’s hands, he’ll be in charge of an army of software engineers who could easily turn his whims into new products.

The Roman Colosseum was a very popular place. It could hold as many as 80,000 people, roughly ten percent of the ancient city’s population. It was a center for entertainment, featuring gladiatorial battles and public spectacles like executions, historical reenactments, and hunting games. And at its heart sat Rome’s emperor, asking the crowd in attendance who should live and who should die, measuring his own popularity and demonstrating his power with a thumb up or down that decided a gladiator’s fate. It was barbaric, but it was also highly entertaining. The Romans gave their citizens bread and circuses to keep them happy. That may well be what Musk, the world’s richest man, plans to do with Twitter.