Watching Elon Musk destroying Twitter has the same creepy fascination that one experienced during the 44 days in 2022 when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were busily employed tanking the British economy. There was, however, one important difference between the two spectacles: Musk actually owns Twitter, whereas Truss and Kwarteng were merely the temporary custodians of the national economy.
With Twitter, the wrecking process started even before Musk owned the company. Having offered to buy it for $44bn (arguably at least twice what it was worth), he then tried to get out of the deal, but was compelled to go through with it. Once installed as the owner, he fired half the staff, including many of the people who understood how its technical infrastructure worked and others who had a good understanding of the complexities of running a social media company in today’s polarised world. He embarked on arbitrary and contradictory decision-making on the hoof, one moment announcing new rules, the next minute abandoning them.
He invited Donald Trump back on to the platform that had won him the Republican nomination – and was rebuffed: Trump doesn’t ever want to be under an obligation to anyone, save perhaps Vladimir Putin. And so he remained on his own platform – Truth Social. Musk insulted advertisers that are the prime source of Twitter’s revenues, and that were concerned about seeing their brands’ messages appearing alongside the ravings of the political extremists and sundry fanatics whom Musk also allowed back on to the service. And when some advertisers expressed their doubts online, they were rewarded with a poo emoji as a reply.
Eventually – and inevitably – these chickens have been coming home to roost. Decimating the company’s technical team was foolish in the extreme, and over the succeeding months, users have noticed that the platform is more fragile than it used to be. In response to a recent series of server emergencies, Musk decided to limit how many tweets a user was allowed to view and how they could view them. This was, wrote the journalist Charlie Warzel, a long-term critic of Musk, “the social media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 pm – a baffling, antithetical business decision for a platform that depends on engaging users (and showing them ads) as much as possible”.
And the hucksters are still staying away. As of February this year, more than half of Twitter’s leading 1,000 advertisers before the acquisition had stopped advertising on the platform. And, according to the New York Times, Twitter’s US advertising revenue for the five weeks from 1 April to the first week of May was $88m, which is 59% lower than a year earlier. All of which makes it tempting to interpret what’s happening to Twitter as the beginning of a death spiral.
Coupled to this is the fact that increasing chaos on the platform has led to an exodus to a range of services such as Mastodon, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, Substack’s Notes and the invite-only Bluesky Social, a Twitter-like platform developed by Jack Dorsey (a co-founder of Twitter) – and, from last week, Instagram Threads, courtesy of Meta. It goes without saying that all these alternatives have pros and cons: all have some Twitter-like features, but none of them looks to me like a proper replacement for it. And Meta’s product comes with the company’s usual comprehensive surveillance.
In that respect, the most significant thing about the exodus is that there is one particular class of user who doesn’t seem to have joined it – professional journalists and politicians, for whom Twitter seems to remain an absolutely must-have service.
The first politician who intuitively understood how important Twitter had become in a networked media ecosystem was Trump. He campaigned by tweets, and indeed governed by them too – to the extent that Russel Neiss, an enterprising geek, wrote a bot that took every one of Trump’s tweets as president and automatically reformatted them as official White House press statements.
Trump also used Twitter to drive the news agenda of mainstream US media in a way that none of his predecessors were able to do. In so doing, he created professional and ethical dilemmas for serious journalists who, on the one hand, understood that they were being manipulated (indeed, led by the nose), but on the other hand felt that they had to remain glued to his Twitter feed because… well, goddammit, he was president of the United States!
All of which leads to the thought that, in our current media ecosystem, if Twitter had not been invented, someone would have to invent it now. The tweet has become the contemporary version of the soundbite. And if Musk does eventually succeed in driving Twitter into bankruptcy, some smart political operator will buy it and make something from its smoking ruins.
What I’m reading
Talk the talk
Terence Tao, one of the world’s leading mathematicians, has a fascinating post on his blog about how to interact intelligently with a large language model.
Artificial stimulation
Marc Andreessen Is (Mostly) Wrong This Time is Gideon Lichfield’s enjoyable dissection in Wired of Andreessen’s AI boosterism.
Quantum realm
Philosopher Huw Price and physicist Ken Wharton’s piece in Aeon magazine, Untangling Entanglement, addresses quantum, the strangest idea in physics.
