Twitter Troubles, or the 280-Character Blues
- A Gentle (and Biased) Guide to Mastodon from Nov 20, 2022, 6:51am
Look, I donât like Twitter or any social media, so Iâm not going to defend them, even though I do post to Twitter, and think that you could probably do worse with your time than follow me. But regardless of my personal feelings and even regardless of what Twitterâs managers might think at any given time, we should talk about the future of the service.
Update: I no longer post to Twitter, so I canât really recommend following me there. Currently, youâll have the best luck following me i class=âfab fa-mastodonâ></i> on Mastodon, instead.
Specifically, as you may have heard, a certain billionaire hasâgranted, my analysis might have a tinge of speculation to itâbecome so offended by people not caring about what he says, that he has chosen to buy his favorite social network, so that he can finally feel powerful.
I could blow this off, and rejoice in the people referring to said billionaire as âApartheid Clydeâ or âSpace Karen.â But I have a nasty habit of digging into what makes social media work or fail for particular purposes, so I might as well make use of that, given the news cycleâŚ
Update, 2022-10-28: Somehow, six months later, he managed to stumble into doing it, despite the improbability of it all and his clear disinterest after the first couple of days. Interestingly, the past six months havenât changed any of my analysis, that I can seeâŚthough this post could probably use some light proofreading.
Why Would Anybody Care?
At least from my perspective, the biggest worry has to do with Twitterâfor better or for worseâhaving become a center of discourse. Brands post on Twitter. Politicians post on Twitter. Unions post on Twitter. Celebrities post on Twitter. Religious leaders post on Twitter. Or at least, their publicists post on Twitter, while they eat lunch. But regardless, because people with status post there, the rest of us can contribute to the same conversations. We can get attention for ideas in that space that is difficult to get elsewhere online or in the outside world.
In addition, people use Twitter to organize events in plain sight. To take part in any of this, you need to have a presence on Twitter. (This should serve to explain why nobody really cares about the governance of other social media platforms. You go to Facebook, for example, to performatively thank your distant relatives for wishing you a happy birthday, rather than trying to tell the Pope why he should re-think his position on abortion or whatnot.)
We have some issues relating to the billionaireâs personality, which Iâll talk about later. However, I can see a bigger and more immediate issue, due to Twitterâs special status. So, letâs take a look at a potential bigger problem, in the possible plans to make Twitter profitable. That starts with explaining Twitterâs success.
Social Media Site of Record
You could reasonably ask why the aforementioned high-status people use Twitter. If they donât use it, then the rest of us have little reason to use it, given how many text-based communications mediums that we have to organize.
In short, powerful people use Twitter, because the media uses Twitter. To be clear, I donât mean âthe media uses Twitterâ in the sense that you can follow your local morning anchor to read about their kids, although that seems true, as well. Rather, I mean that the media uses Twitter in articles, by embedding the tweets from leaders and experts. Even television news often shows tweets on the screen, now, either composed with the reporterâs head or on a literal screen in the studio.
In media terms, you can think of Twitter as the social media equivalent of a newspaper of record, in other words.
And that comes to the first danger of a takeover: The media embeds tweets in articles, because we have basic agreement that either those tweets exist in the form that you find them or the authors have deleted the tweets. We donât risk the possibility that a politician might incite violence or ogle Russian soldiers , then claim that the media invented the story to make them look bad, because the linked tweet just has a cute cat video in itâŚnow. Yes, most people just want to edit their dumb typos. However, we canât deny the âkiller featureâ of editing involves creating the appearance of media persecution.
And letâs face it, when a billionaire identifies as âa free speech absolutist,â they generally mean the freedom from the consequences of their own speech, like a permanent record of everything that they have said, ready for analysis. Twitter, itself, already has Twitter Blue, introducing a paid and brief window for editing. And I need to wonder whether our billionaire understands the difference.
If he doesnât understand the difference, then you can easily see the dominoes fall. Twitter allows people to edit tweets, hoping to increase activity on the platform, and occasionally slink away from consequences ofâfor a random exampleâillegal trading activity . Because we can no longer trust that reporting that includes tweets will match what someone can see elsewhere online, the media stops embedding tweets in articles or showing them on television. With the media no longer routinely providing free advertising for Twitter, and tweeting no longer providing an opportunity for sudden publicity on the national news, experts and other authorities stop using the platform. And with no powerful people using Twitter, the rest of us realize that any other platform would have the same reach and probably stronger engagement with discussions.
And if you plan to suggest some compromise regime where people can edit for the first couple of secondsâŚwell, you already have that feature, by proofreading your tweet before you click âsend.â
In other words, if the new management misunderstands what Twitter has become, a straightforward move can easily turn into the end of Twitter as a significant part of anybodyâs life.
AlsoâŚActual Persecution
I should point out that fabricating persecution and killing the platform doesnât cover the entire problem with a billionaire takeover. I find that problem entertaining, but a bigger threat involves behaving like the far-right claims that social media acts, but directing it against everyone else.
Unfortunately, we canât even treat this problem as merely abstract, since a company run by a slightly different billionaire wanted to suppress terms related to labor organizing . And this billionaire similarly opposes unionizationâŚto an illegal extent .
Maybe you donât like hypothetical examples, though. Maybe youâd prefer to look at specific examples of what âfree speech absolutismâ looks like to a billionaire.
- Tracking the billionaireâs jet does not qualify as free speech, somehow, even though the information comes entirely from public sources that already exist. That creator of the Twitter accountâthink about that and check the timing of this purchaseârefused the offer of a mere five thousand dollars to take the account down. He offered to negotiate, and the billionaire vanished.
- He delights in blocking critics .
- He harassed a whistleblower, extensively spreading conspiracy theories in hopes of discrediting her, in retaliation for exposing corporate wrongdoing.
- As mentioned and linked above, he opposes unions, trying to prevent organizers from getting involved, to an extent that the FTC needed to intervene in his actions.
- I probably donât need to even mention the assorted random feuds, including calling a man a pedophile forâŚrescuing children from drowning.
- He has started harassing his new employees , despite the purchase agreement having clauses penalizing him for doing so.
Because of these issues, when I link the takeover of Twitter to Amazonâs attempt to suppress discussions about unionization, I do so because the storyâs protagonist already has a similar approach to life. Given the right-wing obsession with so-called âshadow-banningââa fiction about websites using secret algorithms to quietly down-rank and reduce the spread of certain material, as if it had significantly less engagement than it actually doesâit doesnât seem at all out of the question to think that a billionaire might use his power running a social media site to silence criticism of him.
And Enabling More Persecution
I almost didnât bother to talk about this, because we donât know anything about the idea. However, I should at least mention that the plan for Twitter might include a plan to âauthenticate all real humans .â And I should mention the layers where this can cause problems.
First, the classic examples of authenticating humans on social media include real name policies, which famously donât work for any real purpose. Far from improving the quality of discourse, forcing people to use their âreal namesââthat is, names listed on their government-issued identificationâexposes marginalized people to harassment off the platform, by revealing their names.
These policies also tend to accidentally include anybody with a common but false nameâcalling yourself âJohn Smith,â for exampleâwhile excluding people with uncommon names (something that a man with a modified Dutch name, who names his children after math, should probably already understand), such as many people from various parts of Asia and Africa, to say nothing of the problems for people whose professional names donât match their government paperwork, for various reasons ranging from pseudonyms to gender transitions.
And collecting information on who âofficiallyâ qualifies as human makes that data a target, including for a man known for harassing critics who show up on Twitter.
Plus, who really cares about automated accounts as such? My Twitter account mostly runs automatically; I usually schedule the tweets listed in my Friday posts recapping my week on Twitter over the weekend, through Twitterâs Tweetdeck product. The Twitter accounts tracking the jets of billionaires and dictatorsânot to mention news outlets linking to their workâall post useful information automatically. Should Twitter take them less seriously, just because a human didnât click Tweet at the time that everyone saw the tweet?
What about the Archives?
I donât have much to say about this, and Ben Powers already said it well . However, we should all worry that a petty billionaireâs ownership of Twitter might put the historical record at risk.
Will a man who routinely deletes tweets after seeing a backlash still make deleted available? Will he âdisappearâ anything that heâd rather people not see? Would he retroactively alter tweets that get him into trouble? Much like allowing people to edit tweets, this could destroy the platformâs reputation and drive people away.
What about Moderation?
Yes, everyone seems to want to talk about the potential for banned personalities to return to Twitter or an increase in misinformation.
And yetâŚTwitterâs moderation already regularly fails people. I regularly report users for spouting racist, homophobic, or transphobic garbage, or openly calling for violence against individuals. In the majority of cases, Twitterâs moderation team responds by insisting that they canât find any problem. I know that many people share this experience.
Plus, banned users canâand often doâalways return under a pseudonym, without Twitter ever knowing the difference. Even âgoodâ moderation generally fails that test.
Long-time readersâand probably most readersâalready know why, of course. One of my first posts explained why social media invariably favors hateful voices: Hate provokes fear and/or anger, which maintain a userâs attention, while also dampening their skepticism. And if you have users doom-scrolling and not thinking things through, you increase the odds that theyâll click on ads.
Donât think that this stops at the Internet. Network television still places all of its dramatic momentsâthe moments that make you hate someone or fear for the heroâjust before commercial breaks, for this reason. Non-local television news basically exists to provoke enough fear and anger to serve you up to advertisers in your weakest state.
In other words, nobody can make Twitter much worse at moderation, because good moderation directly opposes their business model. Good moderation destroys the ad industry, just like sensible news that recommends actions to make your community better does.
AlsoâŚMaybe an Elaborate Prank?
However, a potentially interesting twist nags at the back of my mind: I donât know how legitimate this purchase seems.
Consider that Twitterâs board approved the offer on Monday, April 25th. In almost a week, the story has mostly gone quiet, with little more than details of the agreement leaking out. Does it take that long for one of the richest people in the world to buy a mid-sized company after the company agrees?
Then, we have the goal of taking Twitter private again. Where have I heard that before? Oh, right. It sounds just like the post about taking his car company private in 2018, leading the SEC to mandate that he clear his tweets with them before posting. He failed to remove that restriction on Wednesday. It seems that someone has a habit of declaring intentions to manipulate markets, then trying to walk away, once people stop paying attention.
And we shouldnât ignore that he fouled up the paperwork required for making any large stock purchase. He filed lateâviolating the lawâand filed misleading paperwork claiming that he would act as a passive investor, correcting it after the fact. That similarly makes him seem less serious.
Finally, the purchase agreementâas mentioned beforeâprevents him from disparaging Twitter and its employees , but he started doing so anyway, almost immediately. He might want to test to see if anybody will reprimand him for violating the agreement, or he might not know what he agreed to. However, this could also be his excuse to back out, forcing Twitter to call off the deal, because he couldnât follow the simple agreement.
If he walks away from the deal, itâll cost him a billion dollars . However, he has another company to worry about, with stock prices falling fast on the understanding that he might need to quickly dump his shares to cover the cost of buying Twitter. The latter could cost him more, and the narrative of âcoming homeâ could boost the stock higher than it started, worth more than a billion dollars.
I only have speculation, here, but if I wrote the story to this point, the fictional billionaireâs goals would involve orchestrating this to embarrass the fictional social media giantâs management, by showing them as willing to sell to the worst possible buyer. Or maybe he had petty reasons for buying and now realizes that he doesnât want the responsibility for an organization that needs to keep so many people happy, and would rather lose a billion dollars, less than half a percent of his wealth, the equivalent of the median American young adult wasting about four hundred dollars, or the median adult globally wasting the equivalent of about forty dollars.
In plain English, despite myâand everybody elseâsâconcerns, maybe this deal wonât actually happen.
Alternatives
That covered, we can also look at possible protests against the new management, should the sale come to pass. We could do this two ways: Staying on Twitter and leaving Twitter. Note that I donât recommend either path, here. I just find it interesting to chase down the loose ends, in case it sparks a smarter idea for someone else.
Protesting while staying on Twitter would involve working to maximize the companyâs expenses, while minimizing its revenue. LeavingâŚwell, that shouldnât take much effort to imagine.
Maximizing Twitterâs Expenses
Looking at operating cost data derived from Twitterâs own quarterly reports, we see that their cost of revenueâthe most direct costs of creating or operating productâmakes the largest portion of their expenses, making that an obvious target.
The most direct ways to increase these costs would involve maximizing their bandwidth and storage needs. Many accounts posting unique and large media would require their management to spend more.
Again, I donât recommend this, at all, because it resembles a denial of service attack. However, the terms of service doesnât have anything to say about having multiple accounts or posting âtoo muchâ media, as far as I can tell. And if the media has some artistic purposeâfor example, if these accounts posted procedurally generated images on some theme, careful not to violate anybodyâs copyrightâthen only the most hypocritical âfree speech absolutistâ could really complain, rightâŚ?
Almost equal to that cost is their Research and Development costs plus their administrative costs, which we can lump together as (mostly) labor. And especially if an anti-union boss plans to take over, it isnât an option for the public, but the most direct way to increase those costs includes unionizing the employees. If Twitter became a union shop, the employees would get a better deal and they could protest the new regime.
Minimizing Twitterâs Revenue
At the other end of the problem, Twitter needs to make money for the deal to make sense. Twitter makes most of its money from advertising, with about a tenth coming from licensing its data to researchers. Interestingly, Twitter Blue still doesnât seem significant.
In any case, protests on the revenue side seem clear: Boycott their services. If you pay for Twitter Blue, access to their data, or advertising, stop if you have the freedom to make that decision.
For the rest of usâŚan ad blocker seems like a straightforward boycott, refusing to engage with their advertising arm as a consumer, which has the convenient side effect of helping people who pay for advertising stop doing that. Again, I donât have an actual recommendation, here. I generally use ad blockers for privacy reasons, but I canât rightly tell you that you should, because I donât want to tell you how to feel about ad-sponsored content in general. However, you could just use it for Twitter, if and when the time comesâŚ
Or Just LeaveâŚ
I donât generally consider it a smart move to abandon a platform just because of who leads the company. However, some people might weigh the value that they get from Twitter against the increased psychological costs of feeding a billionaireâs fortune and ego, and decide that they would rather find a better deal somewhere else. For those people, I kicked off 2020âwow, ending exactly two years ago this weekâwith a series of posts about Free Software social networks.
If you explore those alternate networks, feel free to get in touch. I donât interact much, so my accounts all look dead, but I generally poke my head in at least once a week on Diaspora/@jcolag@nota.404.mn
and Mastodon/@jcolag@mastodon.social
, to see if anything interesting came up.
I used to check Secure Scuttlebutt (@RoHPOaN65z8ZVYwPr19Ni4KgYCE05k+FAKMdDPyHbvs=.ed25519
) every morning, but my retreat to this smaller laptop has kept me from doing so in the last few months, at least until I get a server for the house. Similarly, because of a Python library mismatch on my current laptop, I havenât found a way to automatically post to my twtxt feed, so that looks abandonedâŚbut that always seemed like a problematic network, anyway, since it doesnât have a way to get anyoneâs attention. I also gave up on Matrix/Riot, since I didnât know anyone on any of the servers, and all the discussion rooms kept logging me out from inactivity.
The Future
However this particular deal shakes out, it shows the direction of the economy, if we donât stop it: People exploiting the population to amass wealth, then using that wealth to interpose themselves in our daily communication, in hopes of quieting criticism against them. Some might chase newspapers, some might chase social media, and some might chase schools, but consider that the majority of the ten richest people in the world, depending on how you countâBezos, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, and Bloombergâwant to tell you what you should focus your attention on.
We should probably start looking into stopping that trend, probably through some combination of regulation and supporting a more diverse media ecosystem by supporting independent projects.
Credits: I adapted the header imageâby adding a public domain head of Nikola Teslaâfrom Mountain Bluebird by Elaine R. Wilson, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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Tags: rant politics socialmedia