What’s going to happen to Twitter? A few thoughts.
Here’s what I think is going to happen with Twitter. I doubt any of this is news to people but I wanted to put it down in one place. Not comprehensive but things I follow/care about:
1. Twitter will continue to function for the near- to medium-term, though it’ll be wonky and break down sometimes. Generally people will continue use it. The advocacy and reporting communities there will continue to engage. Why? Because that’s where people continue to be listening, governments and NGOs and companies and others. Those who find continued value in it, notwithstanding all the emerging or potential ugliness, will not just throw away the networks they’ve developed there. But this will only continue as long as standards (articulated in content moderation) are maintained, and that’s a big question because of what follows.
2. The Musketeers will bring back bad actors. The Former Guy appears imminent — “vox populi, vox dei”! (What a troll.) The increase in hateful content will soon be evident if it is not already to some communities. Less evident to the public will be the underlying coordination among bad actors to (1) promote hateful, disinforming and potentially inciting content all while (2) shaping a pro-Musk narrative that all is good and you should have just trusted the bro-itocracy.
3. We will know less and less about what Twitter does because of Musk’s history of company opacity (Tesla, SpaceX) and hostility to the press. But even worse, I believe the firing of staff will result in fewer if any transparency reports, or if they continue, they will be less informative. At the same time, the Musketeers will promote new metrics that they think demonstrate good stuff happening. “Just trust us” will be the implicit point, and the VC community will love it (b/c transparency to them is just some ESG nonsense).
4. The loss of staff — particularly content moderators, policy people, and the human rights team, from the most senior to entry-level to contractors — will sooner than later hit users hard, especially outside the United States. Language and context competence will suffer even more (as if you thought it couldn’t be worse!). Teams in country (to the extent they exist) and out will lack the tools to push back against or just slow-roll abusive government demands. Content inciting violence, whether at the broad community scale (such as LGBTQ+ communities or ethnic/religious/racial minorities) or targeted against specific individuals (such as the ever-prevalent misogynistic attacks on journalists), will almost certainly increase.
5. In turn, governments will take cues from what they see happening. Authoritarian governments and non-state bad actors will test the environment and, seeing no push back, will get worse, more brazen than even now. Democratic governments will be increasingly angry with a non-responsive Twitter and take action against it that sets generally bad precedents for online freedom. A kind of corollary to this: Twitter has been an active part of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). Companies share information there on the spread of terrorist or so-called extremist content. Will Twitter even be capable of participating with such reduced policy and technical staff?
6. All the while, it may be that the Musketeers, who only seem to care about the U.S. market, will continue to misinterpret eyeballs on the site as growth and health of the platform. But if 2 through 5 play out as I think is more likely than not, advertisers will indeed leave, and as Yoel Roth pointed out, the App Store gatekeepers will take a hard line and the last days of Twitter will be upon us.
More to say, but that’s enough Twitter for now. I’m still there and at Mastadon @davidkaye@mastodon.social.
