In January 2019, @maplecocaine offered a simple but profound truth about Twitter and its relationship with the broader media environment: “Each day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.”
Generally, it’s not a good thing if everyone on Twitter is talking about you. Just ask Justine Sacco, who in 2013 tweeted a dark, sarcastic joke about racism towards Africa to her 170 followers, before flying to Cape Town to visit family. By the time Sacco’s flight landed, 11 hours later, her ill-advised quip had turned her into a globally trending topic and she was fired from her job in public relations the next day. Becoming Twitter’s main character is usually a prelude to toxic levels of visibility, public shaming or, at a minimum, a wave of online harassment.
For the last few weeks, Elon Musk has been the main character, and he seems to like it. Since buying Twitter, he’s made changes to the platform and the company behind it at a dizzying rate. In the space of just a few days, Musk demanded employees commit to being “extremely hardcore”, working long hours, or resign; saw 1,200 of his remaining 3,700 employees tender their resignations just weeks after cutting staffing in half; announced that several formerly banned users of the platform would be re-admitted, though their tweets would not be promoted by the company’s algorithm; and declared, after a user poll, that Donald Trump would also be allowed back onto the platform, adding the words: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”.
Each of these changes has sparked a deluge of tweets. One side has bemoaned Musk’s decisions and strategised moving to other platforms, such as Mastodon, while the other has rushed to celebrate Musk’s managerial genius. When one fan calculated that layoffs could transform Twitter’s profitability by slashing expenses, a critic observed that one can lose a great deal of weight by cutting off one’s own legs.
Perhaps the attention Musk evidently craves is worth the steep financial price he paid for a money-losing social media platform. But his stint as the main character of Twitter has serious implications for contemporary journalism and, possibly, for democracy.
Twitter is the fourth most used website in the world on laptop and desktop, behind Google, Facebook and YouTube, and just ahead of Instagram. But that may understate its influence and power. Over the past 16 years, Twitter has emerged as a backdoor into the global media cycle. Journalists trawl the site for story ideas and quotes, often finding it easier to search for voices online than on the street or over the telephone.
Activists around the world have learned to harness this power to call attention to their causes: movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo in the United States, #MahsaAmini in Iran and #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria have all leveraged exposure on Twitter to raise awareness of underreported issues. A trending topic can tip off journalists to a story they might have missed, or provide an excuse for a reporter to highlight a longstanding social issue.
Kenyan author Nanjala Nyabola notes that Twitter has allowed activists who might otherwise be silenced in their home countries to reach domestic and international audiences. She points to Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Indian journalist Rana Ayyub, who both have more than one million Twitter followers to whom they express political opinions that often conflict with local authorities. “For all its limitations—and there are many—Twitter is the closest [thing] that the world has to a transnational public sphere,” Nyabola writes.
For all the power Twitter gives to speakers, opening the possibility for their voices to be heard by vast and influential audiences, it’s an even more important tool for listeners. When Facebook brought social networking to mass audiences in 2006, it introduced a vision of online friendship as reciprocal and private. If you wanted to befriend someone, they needed to confirm your relationship before you could read what they posted online. By default, posts were shared only with friends, not with the broader social network.
For the last few weeks, Elon Musk has been the main character on Twitter, and he seems to like it
Twitter inverted this paradigm. By default, tweets are public, which allows anyone from friends to journalists to “reply guys”—who pick fights with random online strangers—to listen and respond. And Twitter is asymmetric, allowing celebrities to broadcast to large audiences without having to hear from all their adoring fans (unless they choose to monitor their notifications). These two affordances mean that, while Facebook is a powerful tool for maintaining relationships with friends, Twitter is unparalleled as a tool for social listening.
Concerned about the forced labour used to build football stadiums for the World Cup? Follow #BoycottQatar2022 and find activists who are using Twitter’s broadcast powers to redirect some of the tournament’s publicity to labour and immigration issues. Follow the individual accounts of people using the hashtag and you may find yourself with a window into conversations in other countries and languages. Fifteen years into using Twitter, my feed is filled with friends I began following during the Arab Spring, the Occupy Nigeria protests and the rallies in Ferguson, Missouri after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer.
Social media platforms do die, often after they’ve been transferred to new owners for eye-watering sums of money. I’ve watched Tumblr, MySpace and Geocities all sink into irrelevance or shut their doors after their founders received generous payouts. Those communities tended to decay slowly. Twitter is in danger of failing quickly, if not due to a catastrophic crash that Musk’s “hardcore” skeleton crew is unable to fix, then due to spam and toxicity. A Twitter that survives a bumpy technical transition might become an unnavigable swamp of cryptocurrency spam. Or, refreshed by the return of Jordan Peterson (and, perhaps soon, Donald Trump, who has so far held off rejoining), Twitter might be reborn as a watering hole for right-wing populists, rapidly outpacing newer competitors like Parler and Truth Social.
Many of my Twitter friends are leaving for Mastodon, a distributed social network that replicates much of Twitter’s functionality. There are key differences—instead of a single server ruled by Elon Musk, each Mastodon server has its own administrator, with the power to set and enforce local rules. As I’ve argued in these pages before, I believe a public sphere built of many more, smaller social networks would be a healthy thing, less subject to the whims of capricious billionaires. But the transition from Twitter to Mastodon is unlikely to be a smooth one.
Because Mastodon servers can have different rules, what’s acceptable on one server might not be acceptable on another. Administrators can “de-federate”—if I really don’t like the rules of your community, I won’t allow my users to follow your users, and vice versa. This de-federation can help keep communities free of harassment, if an irresponsible Mastodon server operator allows a server to become a home for trolls. But they are confusing for users, who have to navigate instances of “you can’t get there from here”.
What’s more, Twitter invested years of development and many millions of dollars in the hope of making its platform safer and more civil. Most Mastodon servers are run by volunteers, who may be unprepared for an influx of abusers. Twitter was able to combat some spam and harassment by programming AI to look for tell-tale patterns of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”. It is much harder to see those patterns across multiple Mastodon servers than on the singular Twitter site.
I think my friends in academia and journalism will make the transition to Mastodon or some other new platform. What I worry about is losing the people who aren’t good friends, but whom I’ve learned so much from by following on Twitter. The site that can ruin your life if you become its main character can also change your point of view with a revealing glimpse of someone else’s world.
If Musk ends up burning Twitter down, will we understand what he destroyed?
