The last days of Twitter
The last days of Twitter
For a more open internet over the next 12 years.
If you’re online or engage news at all, it’s been hard to miss stories about Twitter and its new owner Elon Musk over the last few weeks.
Users are downloading their tweet archives and leaving. PR advisors are wary and advertisers have pulled campaigns. More than 1M people joined Mastodon alone since the sale went through at the end of October.
Fraud
The situation intensified last week when a raft of Twiter fraudsters took advantage of Twitter’s paid verification program and impersonated corporate or individual accounts to poke fun at Musk, embarrass their real-life namesakes, roil the stock market, or scam members of the public out of money.
Targets quickly included the pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, the weapons manufacturer and military contractor Lockheed Martin, the fruit company Chiquita, and the president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. As companies clawed back accounts and issued corrections, commentators like Joshua Hill and Rachel Tobac preserved screenshots for posterity.
Capital
This most recent chapter, though, goes back to Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder who left the company’s board earlier this year but cheered its sale to Musk from the sidelines. In April 2022 comments on the sale, Dorsey endorsed both Musk and his “mission to extend the light of consciousness,” claiming he would bring the company sound leadership.
But Musk started down this road carrying a backpack of trolling and grievance, not light or consciousness or leadership.
Frustrated about account suspensions and other sanctions against users like the evangelical site Babylon Bee and Donald Trump, Musk made Twitter a serious offer to buy. Then, as Twitter started moving the paperwork forward, he tried to back out and had to be sued to see it through.
Forty-four billion United States dollars. I can’t compute the meaning of that amount of money, but that’s how much moved across the table to get this done.
Musk financed the sale partly by selling off some Tesla stock and partly by taking on loans. His investors include a Saudi prince, sundry cryptocurrency companies, investment and capital firms like Fidelity, and even Sean "Diddy" Combs with a small $10M contribution.
Chaos
Musk’s first act as owner was to fire both the CEO Jack had named as his successor and the CFO. Then he continued to send up test balloon tweets, sharing first-draft plans for Twitter on his Twitter feed. He is, above all else, a Reddit alum, and it shows. No disrespect to Reddit.
Musk's next act was to mass-fire nearly half of the company with inadequate advance notice (California law requires 60 days notice for layoffs), and within another two weeks, 80% of contractors.
Staff let go include the accessibility team who made the site usable for people with disabilities; the security and trust team that counters fraud and spam; and some of the engineers who keep Twitter’s hardware running and stable.
Then Twitter attempted to rehire some of the staff they’d summarily fired. Some staff members are now suing Twitter for breaching labor law.
Since the staff shake-up:
A proposal to de-prioritize free accounts in the home feed (so if you don't pay, it'll be hard to find your posts)
Support for and then rejection of a robust content moderation plan that keeps abuse, spam, and fraud down
An increasing exodus of longtime users, particularly those who have large accounts and/or post solid, credible information
It’s an unmitigated mess.
Consequences
Twitter’s decline has devastated a corner of social media that, despite significant issues, has been pivotal to mainstream and grassroots journalism, activist campaigns, and several marginalized communities across the world.
Twitter users are a tiny portion of the global population. At the beginning of 2022, there were reportedly just over 200M daily users, 38M of them in the US.
Yet these users have transformed how companies serve their customers, how faith leaders engage congregants, and how government agencies are building their online voice and tone.
Twitter’s users have produced almost all of the site’s community- and conversation-building effects in spite of the company running the platform and its dependence on advertising dollars and frequent algorithmic changes in favor of paid content, outrage hooks, and noise.
As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci recently explained, tech companies’ first allegiance is not to users who don’t pay them directly, but to advertisers, who do. Over time, this has warped design choices about the interface, how to serve content, and how much to track users in order to show them ads.
A primarily advertiser-financed site is neither free nor healthy. The reliance on advertising by so much of our digital public sphere—Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter—has perniciously fueled tribalization, hate speech and surveillance.
With advertiser-financed digital media, advertisers are the true customers, and what they are paying for is our attention, as much of it as they can get for as long as possible, and our data, so that they can target ads with more precision. —Zeynep Tufekci, “When Twitter is ‘Free,’ We Pay With Our Privacy” (November 2022)
In these last strange, strained days, cynics and chaos agents proliferate, decimating user trust in the process.
The breached trust thermocline
I happened to be on Twitter last weekend as journalists, tech commentators, and social analysts reckoned with the first firing wave after the site’s sale. In the midst of that general cloud of What-On-Earth-Is-Going-On, John Bull posted a long thread on what companies need to know and rarely heed about the trust of their users or stakeholders.
He began with the metaphor of the thermocline, a feature in large lakes and oceans that separates the warmer surface layer from the very, very cold water below. If you breach the thermocline in a lake or in the ocean, you’ll freeze, faster than you expect. And if you breach the trust thermocline in business, you’ll lose your customers, faster than you expect.
The thread’s worth reading in its entirety.
And now what?
I’ve been thinking about my last 12 years on Twitter as well as the 12 years before that: Jupiter’s done two full orbits since I sent my first email and one orbit since I sent my first tweet.
Over the last month, I’ve reduced my Twitter presence and have joined a general-audience Mastodon instance to learn what a decentralized and ad-free social experience feels like now. It’s a very different vibe than what the Bird app came to offer: slower, more conversational, and less reactive—at least so far.
In the meantime, I’m also thinking about digital spaces like this Substack and my website, both of which I designed for longer, slower, deeper thinking and writing with relatively small audiences. They’re set up quite differently than the chats and forums I enjoyed for my first several years online and still miss.
Some of those broader sites were sprawling, international networks. Some focused on a single issue while others hosted mixed communities that talked their way up and down the library stacks, connecting ideas as much as they connected people who otherwise would never have met.
Twitter was like that, too, until it wasn’t.
The last decade of social media has encouraged lots of narrowing, lots of customization and personalization, lots of niches that talk less and less to each other. I’m curious whether federated blogging tools like Mastodon are a sign we’re longing for a swing back in the other direction, out of walled gardens and into more open air.
What will it look like for more people to create on their own terms rather than on the virility terms of the platform they’re digitally renting? What will it mean for creators to make on more non-commercial platforms?
How, too, will non-profit funders help social sector organizations bridge the community and communication infrastructure gaps that the collapse of Facebook and Twitter has exposed this last decade?
Beyond funding websites or journals, will philanthropy also fund alternatives to the servers and networks we need so this can be the last time millions of people have to look for new homes on the internet because of a few bored billionaires enamored with AI, authoritarianism, and attention?
And you? How do you read this season of changes online, in politics, and in your communities?
Reply below or email me.
I’d love to hear your sense of things.
Talk soon,
Keisha
Three Things
Dave Karpf analyzes the US’ recent midterms. Results: mixed, better than expected, and an opportunity we can’t afford to waste. (Nov 2022)
Emile Torres defines longtermism and effective altruism, explaining how these philosophies and ideologies are shaping an influential swathe of tech, business, and academic leaders now. (Aeon, Oct 2022)
Visual Capitalist lays out a quick guide to current challenges in mass media—and there are several! The blend of illustration, graphic design, and clear thinking is an asset to this piece. (June 2022)
Excellent article.
I’m here and have also revived my Tumblr account!