The Fall of the House of Twitter

It has been a long year on Twitter. Many people have lost a great deal with the changes that have been implemented after the sale to Elon Mush that-almost-wasn’t. Personally, Twitter has been my biggest platform and I’ve lost almost all traffic from Twitter. Between deprioritizing links out from the platform and getting rid of link titles, Elon aims to keep everyone on the platform but doesn’t understand what Twitter was for in the first place. It was started as a micro-blogging platform and developed into a place for content creators to engage with their fans and to help people discover content their enjoyed from their favorite creators.

Mid-Tweet

Twitter was the also-ran of social media platforms. The only reason Twitter was ever important is because of the users. The user base included every celebrity, politician, and major brand in the world. Suddenly, you could tweet at famous people or get support from an airline. Twitter is a middling platform at best but thanks to its user base who could command attention (especially Donald Trump) Twitter was able to punch above its weight and command a presence in the marketplace that has never really existed for Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. Facebook has the advantage of a large and active user-base across its apps. It’s the most used but Facebook posts don’t program television shows. Twitter, on the other hand, absolutely is the most powerful programming tool in television and across nearly all media.

Elon has designs on turning Twitter (Now X) into the American WeChat. In China, WeChat is an everything platform. It’s Amazon, Uber, DoorDash, and WhatsApp all blended into one giant platform. In China, everything happens on WeChat. Elon has stated publicly that is his goal but he seems to be choosing a very odd way of going about it. Indeed, X is a poor platform for such an idea. He would be better served by building something new. By the time Elon builds his American WeChat, will there be anyone left to use it?

Politics Pivot

One of the biggest changes on the platform, is the reintroduction of the racism and anti-semitism that the previous management had purged from the platform. I can testify to this personally, people can call you the n-word now and even when it gets reported, it passes on by (this happened just the other day). I have never seen this level of anti-semitism and open racism. It is worth noting that these opinions are far more common and more acceptable than anyone wants to admit. In his quest for a “free-speech platform” he has reintroduced some of the worst purveyors of content and some of the lowest opinions. Elon is caught in the tolerance paradox but has decided that he may as well simply tolerate racism and anti-semitism as bog standard. However, when it comes to his advertisers and many users, they can vote with their feet and simply leave the platform behind, and many have already done so.

There is also the factor about Twitter being used to “rig the election.” This is continuation of the “big lie” about the 2020 election that despite everything we learned from the Twitter Files, still doesn’t quite bear out. Twitter, like other social media platforms, complied with their legal obligations from the government. Evidence of Twitter doing anything to shift public opinion about the election or anything like that remains scant at best.

Ultimately, Elon and many others wanted a mainstream space online where they could say things that were no longer respectable in mainstream society. They wanted to talk about racism openly with clever graphs about IQ distribution. This was the real goal: to break the back of an online community whose outsized influence had suppressed this type of conversation. However, Elon doesn’t realize that the reason Twitter had that influence was due to the user base (see above).

The Future of Twitter

Contrary to popular belief, I doubt Twitter will entirely die off as a platform. For now, there are still too many people using it, including myself. However, as major brands pull away both with content and with advertising dollars, what form Twitter will continue in, remains to be seen. One thing is for certain: twitter’s days as a platform that can punch above its weight in popularity and attention are quite over. What does that mean for the future? It means Twitter will be stuck between the juggernauts of Facebook, Instagram and now Tik Tok as a place for people to connect and Twitter will have to embrace its true status as a middling also-ran. This already reflected in its falling valuation. Elon paid $44 Billion for a platform now worth around $9 Billion. I can’t help but wonder what he is thinking about that. Was the purchase really worth it?