Admitting your mistakes publicly is like a colonoscopy, certainly unpleasant, but fundamentally beneficial to yourself. So I’ll admit it: I initially misread Twitter.
Twitter’s microblogging service had just launched in 2006, 16 years before it was acquired by Elon Musk. At the time, I thought the service didn’t make sense. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey called tweets a “sudden explosion of irrelevant information,” and I think that sounds plausible. I may have expressed this opinion publicly, most likely on Facebook or some blogging platform. I remember asking in an article what is the difference between a tweet and a Facebook status update? I don’t remember when this article was published, it has been buried in the vastness of the Internet Archive. Are the two fundamentally not the same thing? For example, I had XXX for lunch. The Twitter platform only supports posting one or two sentences at a time, and cannot exceed 140 characters. Why should you join such a platform?
I didn’t understand it at the time, but soon this mandatory brevity requirement (despite the current 280-character limit) made Twitter so successful that I saw its strengths. Images and videos can be posted on Twitter, but it is fundamentally a writer’s platform that requires users to be concise.
I started blogging early on (and co-founded a site, Gawker, which ended up at the hands of billionaire Peter Thiel and my brother’s childhood idol, Hawk Hawken). One of the things I love about blogging is that it opens up a new mode of communication: linking to other blogs and having a follow-up conversation with other people I don’t know. You can learn new things, meet people you might not otherwise meet, and have conversations that are hard to orchestrate offline.
The ideal form of Twitter is like this. Even better. It rewards intellectual statements, descriptions of shared experiences, analysis of big issues, and hilarious jokes. The people I made on Twitter became my friends in real life. There have been many times when I’ve had a deep dive into a disagreement with someone else on Twitter, and I’ve been able to better understand the other person’s point of view and develop a more nuanced understanding of the issues involved. It’s no wonder that conversations on Twitter have sparked far-reaching social change, such as the #MeToo movement, as well as the transgender rights movement and the transgender community movement, and it has also become a platform for organizing and supporting protest movements such as Black Lives Matter.
But we also quickly learned that disinformation, gratuitous slander, and harassment thrive on Twitter. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this: the public square is not always a civilized place, and many people have been burned at the stake in public squares. It was quickly discovered that the platform, dubbed by many as “the hell site,” rewarded provocative behavior, fostered and over-amplified racism, homophobia, bullying and misogyny. Like other social media platforms, Twitter has proved unable to crack down on disinformation quickly and deeply enough to destabilize American democracy. The ability for Twitter users to remain anonymous is a double-edged sword: While it protects whistleblowers, it can also be exploited by provocateurs seeking to harass others or create chaos.
It is not difficult to understand that Elon Musk wants to acquire this platform.
Now that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has bought Twitter for a whopping $44 billion, he appears intent on destroying it for good. He fired key personnel via email; reinstated banned accounts, including many with right-wing leanings (including former President Donald Trump’s); Part of the technical infrastructure, including microservices that support two-factor authentication, etc. Later, Musk realized that he had dismissed some talents that Twitter actually needed, so he urgently asked managers to recruit these employees back. We know about his moves in part because he himself tweeted about them in real time. In the words of the Internet industry, he has been “publishing the whole process on the Internet”.
Billionaires usually don’t need to rely on microblogging to make their voices heard, and they can get a lot of exposure in traditional media. So, to understand the allure of having Twitter, we should think about how Twitter affects the way we see the world. Twitter has a fraction of the daily active users of Facebook, but for better or for worse, there are many public figures on Twitter, as well as many journalists and others who shape the narrative structure that makes us think that’s reality. Many people turn to Twitter for information, whether it’s public health, global conflict, or what Harry Styles is doing at a given moment, and they’re still forming their ideological worldviews here.
This has both advantages and disadvantages. Twitter was used to organize and support revolutions, most notably during the Arab Spring in 2011, but could also be used to spread lies about QAnon and many other conspiracy theories. During the outbreak, Twitter was used to promote recommendations such as wearing masks, maintaining social distance and getting vaccinated, but it also became a vehicle for the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda. It is a document that is updated in real time, recording what is happening at a certain moment. If you hear a loud bang coming from your window, you might search for “loud” plus the name of the community and figure out what’s causing the bang in minutes.
Simply put, Twitter is one of the most powerful and widespread mechanisms for discovering and disseminating information on the Internet. If you want to gain influence, if you’re interested in reshaping the way the world thinks about something, you probably use Twitter. If you want to dominate the discourse and silence those who disagree with you or think your jokes are not funny, you probably want to have this platform.
For users who have spent a lot of time on Twitter for 16 years, it is difficult to imagine what the world would be like without Twitter, and how you would feel about it.
Will we find the answer to this question? Right now, the site is like a “train wreck in slow motion.” Monetization is one of Musk’s biggest challenges, especially in order to pay off the debt incurred to buy Twitter, which he needs to pay about a billion dollars a year. Twitter’s main source of revenue is advertising, but Musk’s seemingly inexplicable decision to destroy that revenue stream and has been alienating advertisers has caused Twitter to miss its ad revenue goals by a wide margin. Company insiders told The New York Times that the company lowered its revenue forecast for the final quarter of 2022 from $1.4 billion to $1.3 billion, and later lowered it further to $1.1 billion. Since Musk took over Twitter, hate speech has become more rampant, mass layoffs and resignations have disrupted the site’s content moderation and other operations, and Musk’s large layoffs in engineering have affected the usability of the platform.
Users will find all sorts of glitches: Notification tabs don’t work, websites load abnormally, etc. If you’re a liberal female writer like I am, you’ll see more and more men insulting you with nasty words and using the word “rape.” Meanwhile, half of advertisers have left the platform, which has been flooded with tweets that brands don’t want to be associated with, such as lewd memes, overly polarizing tirades and white supremacists whose accounts have been reinstated.
My first thought was the “boiling frog” metaphor, but Twitter’s current situation is more like you’re watching people play a game of Jenga from above. You watch as blocks are removed and the entire structure becomes unstable. You know very well that this block tower will eventually collapse. But outwardly, it remains intact. Musk thinks everything is going well because there are many users on the platform. Of course it is. People will also watch the accident scene.
Musk’s use of Twitter to amplify his voice and align himself with various right-wing figures is neither new nor interesting: Media bosses often use their platforms for political and personal ends. Rupert Murdoch may not have had a constant voice, but his ideological influence has influenced the way Fox, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal editorial columns explain the world.
But it’s a shame this happened to Twitter because while there’s all sorts of confusing information on this hellish site, it’s a great platform overall.
Its chaos is the embodiment of a certain democratic spirit. In theory, the same resources are available to any user who hasn’t paid for special features on the platform, whether you’re the President of the United States of America, or @john292838374 who just joined the platform yesterday and still has an egg as the default avatar. (In fact, there is also a hierarchy on Twitter, where users with more followers have higher volume, and users with a blue check mark “verified” are sometimes considered more credible, because you know their authenticity identities, not three shady men in trench coats hiding behind broadband. Musk is also dismantling the system.)
Although insincere, Twitter itself has a cheerful, retro mischievous quality. My most memorable moment was when a good friend registered a counterfeit @wise_spiers on Twitter that pretended to be me (Smart Spiers). Clever Spiers is an extreme, comical alter-ego: her bio describes her as a “petite, enigmatic visionary,” and she talks like an unusually determined and ambitious robot. This account is just for teasing me in a friendly way and posting some jokes between us. At that time, I was the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in New York, and all my subordinates followed that account, which made me a little flustered. That hadn’t been the friend’s original intention, but he was encouraged by the discovery of the situation. Twitter’s terms of service specifically forbid impersonation, and the account was eventually banned, and I got a blue checkmark for it. But I’d rather not have the logo, and would like to have the clever Spiers account restored. That account has brought me so much joy.
The question now is, can Twitter live with the current situation? What I want to emphasize is that Musk deserves to be blamed. He didn’t bother to understand Twitter’s business or how its technology worked before he bought it, and despite his self-proclaimed strict code reviewer, he didn’t understand the importance of brand safety to advertisers. Now he needs to make up for his mistakes.
I think the biggest existential threat to Elon Musk’s Twitter is easy to understand: We’ll eventually tire of the platform. We have a similar mindset about Musk’s obnoxiously provocative remarks. Unless he can fix it, the poor state of the site will lead to loss of users. Every day legions of users leave in search of new digital spaces, taking with them powerful ideas, fresh ideas, tough questions and good jokes.
It’s a pity. 16 years ago, I mistakenly thought Twitter was meaningless. It’s actually pretty fun, and it once had a mission. But soon, it becomes dull, and spending time on the platform becomes less and less rewarding.
The chaotic but vibrant plaza that Dorsey and colleagues created isn’t quite gone, but I’m starting to miss it. (Fortune Chinese website)
The author of this article, Elizabeth Spiers, is the founding editor of Gawker and has established Dealbreaker and other blogs. She was also a columnist for Fortune magazine in the field of finance and economics. She has been using Twitter for 14 years.
Opinions expressed in opinion articles published on Fortune.com are solely those of the author and do not represent the views and positions of Fortune magazine.
Translated by: Liu Jinlong
Reviewer: Wang Hao
Admitting you are wrong in public is deeply unpleasant and fundamentally good for you, like a colonoscopy. So here goes: I was wrong about Twitter.
When the microblogging service launched in 2006, 16 years before it was bought by Elon Musk, I thought it sounded pointless. Co-founder Jack Dorsey described a tweet as “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and I thought, that sounds about right .I probably said this publicly somewhere—most likely Facebook or some blogging platform. What’s the difference, I remember writing, in a post lost to time and the bowls of The Internet Archive, between a tweet and a Facebook status update? Aren’t they basically the same thing? Here’s what I had for lunch: blah blah blah. And why join a platform that only allows you to write a sentence or two at a time—nothing longer than 140 characters?
What I didn’t understand then, but came to soon after, is that Twitter worked in part because of the enforced brevity (even though the character limit is now 280 characters). Yes, there are images and videos, but it’s fundamentally a writer’s platform, requiring the user to be pithy and concise.
I’d been an early adapter to blogging (and co-founded a website called Gawker that eventually died at the hands of a billionaire named Peter Thiel and my younger brother’s childhood hero, Hulk Hogan). What I’d loved about early blogging was its new mode of communication: Linking to another blog created a kind of meta conversation with other people I’d never met. You could learn new things, meet people you’d never otherwise encounter, and have conversations that would be difficult to engineer offline .
Twitter, in its ideal form, was exactly like that. Even better. It rewarded intellectually challenging arguments, articulations of shared experience, parsing of big questions, and funny jokes. I’ve made friends on Twitter who became my friends in real life. Many times, after talking through a point of disagreement with someone else on the platform, I came away understanding their point of view better, and with a more nuanced understanding of the issue at hand. It’s no wonder that conversations on Twitter drove profound social shifts such as #MeToo and the movements for trans rights and visibility, and that it was a place to organize and consolidate support for protests such as Black Lives Matter.
Also, we all soon came to understand, Twitter is a cesspool of disinformation, gratuitous sniping, and harassment. Perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised us: The public square is not always a civil place, and plenty of people have been burned at the stake in one. But it soon became clear that the platform many began to refer to as a “hellsite” rewards provocation, and nursed racism, homophobia, bullying, and misogyny—while amplifying it to unprecedented proportions. Twitter, like other social media platforms , has also shown that it cannot combat disinformation deeply or quickly enough to prevent it from destabilizing democracies. And the ability to be anonymous as a user is a double-edged sword: good for whistleblowers, and also good for trolls who want to harass others or create chaos.
It’s no wonder that Elon Musk wanted to buy it.
Now that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has bought Twitter for the inflated price of $44 billion, he seems intent upon burning it to the ground. He has fired critical personnel via email; reinstated accounts that were banned, including many with a right-wing bent (including the account of former President Donald Trump); and eliminated much of the technological infrastructure that is crucial to Twitter’s continued ability to function, including many of the microservices that power features such as two-factor authentication. Twitter actually needs and frantically had managers try to recruit them back. We know that he’s done all of this in part because he has Tweeted about it, in real time. He is, in internet parlance, “posting through it.”
Billionaires generally do not need microblogging platforms to be heard—they get plenty of coverage in the traditional media. So to understand the appeal of owning Twitter, it’s worth considering how it has affected the way we process the world. Twitter’s daily active just users are a small fraction of Facebook’s, but for better or worse, a lot of public figures are on Twitter, and so are a lot of journalists and other people who shape narrative constructions of what we perceive to be reality. Whether about public health, global conflicts , or whatever Harry Styles is doing at any given moment, a lot of people get their news from Twitter, as well as their ideological worldview.
This is both good and bad. It has been used to organize and support revolutions—most famously during the Arab Spring of 2011—and also to disseminate the lies of QAnon and many other conspiracies. During the pandemic, it was useful for distributing advice about masking, social distancing, and vaccines—but also a vector for anti-vaxxer propaganda. It is such a living document of what is happening at any given moment, that if you hear a loud boom through your window, you can probably search for “loud boom” along with the name of your neighborhood, and find out what caused the sound in minutes.
Twitter is, put simply, one of the most powerful and expansive mechanisms for information discovery and distribution on the internet. If you want influence, if you’re interested in reshaping how the world thinks about things, you’re probably on Twitter. you want to dominate the discourse and squash anyone who disagrees with you or thinks your jokes are unfunny, you might want to own it.
And for those of us who have spent significant time on Twitter for 16 years, it’s hard to imagine what the world will look and feel like without it.
Will we have to find out? Right now, the site is a slow-motion train wreck. Monetization is one of Musk’s biggest challenges, especially given the billion or so a year he has to pay to service the debt he used to buy the company . Twitter is monetized primarily through advertising, though Musk seems inexplicably determined to destroy that revenue stream and has been alienating advertisers, causing Twitter to miss its ad sales targets by large margins. Projections from $1.4 billion in the last quarter of 2022 to $1.3 billion, and then to $1.1 billion. Since Musk took over, hate speech has become more viral, the site’s content moderation and other operations have been snarled by the epic staff layoffs and resignations, And Musk’s disemboweling of engineering departments are rendering the platform less usable.
As a user, you experience it in glitches: Your notification tab doesn’t work, the site loads weirdly. If you’re a liberal woman writer, as I am, you may notice an uptick in the number of men calling you unspeakable things and invoking the word “rape.” Meanwhile, half of Twitter’s advertisers have left the platform as it has been flooded with tweets that brands don’t want to be anywhere near—racy memes, overtly partisan screeds, and white supremacists whose accounts have been reinstated.
“Frog boiling in water” is the first metaphor that comes to mind, but it’s really more like looking at a Jenga tower from above as the game is being played. You know pieces are disappearing one by one and it’s making the whole thing more unstable . You understand that eventually, it’s going to all come crashing down. But it still looks whole on the surface. Musk thinks this is all going very well because there are a lot of people on the platform. And of course there are. gawk at car crashes.
The fact that Musk has used Twitter to amplify and agree with various right-wing figures is not particularly novel or interesting in itself: Media owners have always used their outlets for political and personal ends. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t post through it, but his Ideological fingerprints are all over the way Fox, The New York Post, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal explain the world.
It’s a shame this is happening at Twitter, however, because that hellsite was often a great place to be, for all of its messiness.
Its mess was the mess of a certain kind of democracy. In theory, the resources available to a user who’s not paying for special features on the platform are the same whether you’re President of the United States, or @john292838374 who joined yesterday and whose avatar is still the default egg. (In practice, there is a bit of a hierarchy in that users with more followers are heard more, and users who were “verified” with blue check marks are sometimes considered more credible because you know they are who they say they are, and are not secretly three weasels in a trench coat with a broadband connection. Musk is dismantling that system too.)
But even when it isn’t entirely sincere, Twitter can have a kind of delightful, retro mischievousness to it. A favorite memory for me is the time when one of my best friends was impersonating me on Twitter under an account titled @wise_spiers. Wise Spiers was an extreme, caricatured version of me: Her bio was “tiny mysterious visionary” and she talked like a very determined and ambitious robot. The account basically existed to lovingly skewer me and advance our inside jokes. I was the editor in chief of a New York newspaper at the time, and slightly to my horror, my staffers followed the account. This was not my friend’s intention, but once he realized it was happening, it only encouraged him. Twitter’s terms of service specifically prohibit impersonation and eventually the account was banned — and I ended up with a blue check as a result. I’d give back the blue check to have Wise Spiers back, though. It was hilarious.
The question now is, will Twitter endure? I cannot emphasize this enough: Musk did this to himself. He did not bother to understand Twitter’s business before he bought the company, did not learn how its technology works despite his pretensions of being an exact examiner of code, and did not understand how important brand safety is to advertisers. Now he has to make it up.
But I think the biggest existential threat to Elon Musk’s Twitter is simpler: We’ll all finally get bored of it. There’s a sameness to Musk’s provocations that is tiresome. And unless he fixes the things he’s broken, the jankiness of the site will drive users away. Great people leave every day, searching for new digital spaces to set up camp in — and they take with them their strong opinions, fresh ideas, hard questions, and funny jokes.
That’s a shame. I was wrong 16 years ago when I thought Twitter was pointless. It was interesting, and it served a purpose. But it’s becoming uninteresting quickly, and spending time on it is increasingly, well… actually pointless.
That messy, vibrant town square that Dorsey and his colleagues created is not completely gone yet, but I already miss it.
Elizabeth Spiers was the founding editor of Gawker, and started Dealbreaker and several other blogs. She is also a former columnist for Fortune, writing about finance and economics. She has been on Twitter for 14 years.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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