Why Twitter remains the dominant social media platform
How is it that no one can dethrone Twitter, now rebranded as Elon Musk's X as the place everyone goes online to share views and swap news?
After all, since buying the platform two years ago, apparently "accidentally", Elon Musk has often seemed to be set on annoying everyone.
He's increasingly using the platform to impose his political views and is regularly to be found in 'Spaces' pontificating his own voice.
Twitter's admittedly rather partisan and annoying team of moderators was sent packing early on, replaced by naive and ineffectual attempts to automate content management.
At the same time, rather than promote Twitter (X) as being a neutral platform, it has become an opinionated space with a small group of cadres led by Musk himself at the forefront loudly promoting their own, often controversial takes.
The self-declared "Chief Twit", is a prolific tweeter and has used the platform to promote his many businesses, share memes and more recently, weigh in on geopolitics.
Like many a Twitter user, Musk seems to tweet first and think later. In fact, he originally seems to have been sucked into owning the platform owing to a tweet on April 14 2022, perhaps the most expensive tweet ever, in which he simply said "I made an offer", together with a link.
He then tried to withdraw his offer prompting a legal tussle with the company which… he lost. On October 27 2022, he finally bought the company paying $54.20 a share which doesn't sound very much but there were a lot of shares. The tweet set him back $44 billion eventually.
"Tweet first, think later" is something of a Musk meme. On the 16th of August 2019, for example, Musk sent a two-word tweet, "Nuke Mars". In a series of follow-up tweets, he said he was planning T-shirts with the slogan "coming soon" while explaining that his idea was to use nuclear explosions to create man-made suns on Mars - but without causing radioactivity.
Musk has gone relatively quiet though on Mars lately. Instead, he has repeatedly used Twitter to try to settle the Ukraine-Russia conflict, essentially by pressing Ukraine to make concessions to Russia. Ukraine's elections, he tweeted, were illegitimate (unlike the ritual endorsements of Putin in Russia, presumably) and needed redoing while the whole country needed to renounce NATO aspirations. Characteristically, having trailed his ideas, he polled his 108 million Twitter followers, asking whether they supported his call for a neutral Ukraine and lost. Nearly 60% said that they disagreed with his plan.
All this high profile windbaggery disconcerted investors and so, in a bid to reassure the markets that Twitter was in safe hands, in June 2023 Elon announced that he had hired Linda Yaccarino to take over as Twitter's chief executive. Musk said he was "excited" to bring on someone who could "focus primarily on business operations."
Yaccarino's first memo to employees spoke blandly of "Building Twitter 2.0 Together" and echoed her boss Elon Musk's stated goals for the company.
She wrote: "Twitter is on a mission to become the world's most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication. We're on the precipice of making history - and that's not an empty promise. That's OUR reality."
Maybe we should mention that Linda Yaccarino's previous life was in advertising. Anyway, since being appointed she seems to have only a rather modest influence on the platform, holding regular "tea time" gatherings for staff, which have been described as part of an effort to get the company's remaining workers to come into the office.
Meanwhile, Musk continued to dismantle many of the key features of Twitter, including its name and the iconic bird symbol - replacing them both with the letter "X".
So, all in all, you might think Twitter was ripe for replacement as the world's "public square" - a place where anyone could speak and potentially be heard by millions. But although the New York Times sourly described the site as not so much a town square as a "theater" and the Washington Post claimed in an opinion piece (July 7 2023) that a "series of disastrous missteps" had driven people to, er… TikTok instead, in fact, two years after the Musk takeover and the following advertiser walk-out, breaking news and key aspects of public debate remain on Twitter and nowhere else has the same reach or impact.
That's despite the fact that there's now a long list of "Twitter rivals" including Bluesky, TikTok, Clubhouse. This last, an audio-only app where people talk to each other in a live podcast forum, Mastodon (again, like Twitter a micro-blogging site) not to forget Zuckerberg's "Threads", launched with a fanfare and then largely forgotten.
As long as these platforms are dwarfed beside Twitter's millions of active users and infinite discussions, they, will be stuck in silence. Bluesky claims 2 million users, for example. Threads has more - but how many of these "users" are actually online? Not so many. Because if it's not on Twitter, it's not news.
And so, in short, it seems that announcements of the death of Twitter may have been premature. Unless Elon, literally forces users away (by making people pay to use Twitter for example) they will put up with Musk's many annoying changes for the very practical reason that, well, everyone else is there and (the other side of the coin) no one else in on the other platforms. So, whether called "X" or not, the odds are that Twitter's constantly updating feed is still the only one you'll care about.
Tweets are influential, Threads, Skeets (that's the name for Bluesky posts), Toots (that's Mastodon) just aren't! And so today, for better or for worse, Twitter remains the town square.
Three Tweets that went terribly (but illustrate the power of the platform)
March 28 2018 Give a "like" to Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, for this tweet of him having a right old laugh with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in March.
Musk has gone relatively quiet though on Mars lately. Instead, he has repeatedly used Twitter to try to settle the Ukraine-Russia conflict, essentially by pressing Ukraine to make concessions to Russia. Ukraine's elections, he tweeted, were illegitimate (unlike the ritual endorsements of Putin in Russia, presumably) and needed redoing while the whole country needed to renounce NATO aspirations. Characteristically, having trailed his ideas, he polled his 108 million Twitter followers, asking whether they supported his call for a neutral Ukraine and lost. Nearly 60% said that they disagreed with his plan.
All this high profile windbaggery disconcerted investors and so, in a bid to reassure the markets that Twitter was in safe hands, in June 2023 Elon announced that he had hired Linda Yaccarino to take over as Twitter's chief executive. Musk said he was "excited" to bring on someone who could "focus primarily on business operations."
Yaccarino's first memo to employees spoke blandly of "Building Twitter 2.0 Together" and echoed her boss Elon Musk's stated goals for the company.
She wrote: "Twitter is on a mission to become the world's most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication. We're on the precipice of making history - and that's not an empty promise. That's OUR reality."
Maybe we should mention that Linda Yaccarino's previous life was in advertising. Anyway, since being appointed she seems to have only a rather modest influence on the platform, holding regular "tea time" gatherings for staff, which have been described as part of an effort to get the company's remaining workers to come into the office.
Meanwhile, Musk continued to dismantle many of the key features of Twitter, including its name and the iconic bird symbol - replacing them both with the letter "X".
So, all in all, you might think Twitter was ripe for replacement as the world's "public square" - a place where anyone could speak and potentially be heard by millions. But although the New York Times sourly described the site as not so much a town square as a "theater" and the Washington Post claimed in an opinion piece (July 7 2023) that a "series of disastrous missteps" had driven people to, er… TikTok instead, in fact, two years after the Musk takeover and the following advertiser walk-out, breaking news and key aspects of public debate remain on Twitter and nowhere else has the same reach or impact.
That's despite the fact that there's now a long list of "Twitter rivals" including Bluesky, TikTok, Clubhouse. This last, an audio-only app where people talk to each other in a live podcast forum, Mastodon (again, like Twitter a micro-blogging site) not to forget Zuckerberg's "Threads", launched with a fanfare and then largely forgotten.
As long as these platforms are dwarfed beside Twitter's millions of active users and infinite discussions, they, will be stuck in silence. Bluesky claims 2 million users, for example. Threads has more - but how many of these "users" are actually online? Not so many. Because if it's not on Twitter, it's not news.
And so, in short, it seems that announcements of the death of Twitter may have been premature. Unless Elon, literally forces users away (by making people pay to use Twitter for example) they will put up with Musk's many annoying changes for the very practical reason that, well, everyone else is there and (the other side of the coin) no one else in on the other platforms. So, whether called "X" or not, the odds are that Twitter's constantly updating feed is still the only one you'll care about.
Tweets are influential, Threads, Skeets (that's the name for Bluesky posts), Toots (that's Mastodon) just aren't! And so today, for better or for worse, Twitter remains the town square.
Three Tweets that went terribly (but illustrate the power of the platform)
March 28 2018 Give a "like" to Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, for this tweet of him having a right old laugh with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in March.
"The Crown Prince is always impressive when he sets out his vision for the KSA. Can't remember WHEN my beard turned white, but I remember WHY. MBS is much younger and I'm sure handles stress better!"
Six months later, the Crown Prince was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
At 10H 19 ET on Friday, Justine Sacco, a PR director at InterActiveCorp (IAC), posted a tweet shortly before flying from London to Cape Town, South Africa. It ran: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"
By the time she arrived in South Africa, she had lost not only her job but her credibility. Her tweet was number one in the trends and everyone was furious at her. The only good thing is she spent some month afterwards working as a volunteer in Ethiopia doing P.R. for an NGO working to reduce maternal-mortality.
In March 2011, the search engine Bing made a marketing link to… an earthquake in Japan. Their tweet promised a $1 earthquake donation for every retweet it got, an offer that many people perceived as exploitative marketing.
The backlash was rapid. Someone started a #FuckBing hashtag. Bing changed tack, apologized profusely and donated the full $100 000 up front. That makes this an expensive tweet - but of course, far from the most expensive misjudgement.
Six months later, the Crown Prince was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
At 10H 19 ET on Friday, Justine Sacco, a PR director at InterActiveCorp (IAC), posted a tweet shortly before flying from London to Cape Town, South Africa. It ran: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"
By the time she arrived in South Africa, she had lost not only her job but her credibility. Her tweet was number one in the trends and everyone was furious at her. The only good thing is she spent some month afterwards working as a volunteer in Ethiopia doing P.R. for an NGO working to reduce maternal-mortality.
In March 2011, the search engine Bing made a marketing link to… an earthquake in Japan. Their tweet promised a $1 earthquake donation for every retweet it got, an offer that many people perceived as exploitative marketing.
The backlash was rapid. Someone started a #FuckBing hashtag. Bing changed tack, apologized profusely and donated the full $100 000 up front. That makes this an expensive tweet - but of course, far from the most expensive misjudgement.
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