Twitter

A previous Twitter logo

The X-tremely kewl current logo made by Elon Musk resembling a porn logo.

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“”You fucked up real good, kiddo. Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

—Nilay Patel, "Welcome to hell, Elon", The Verge, 28 October 2022

Twitter, or as some asshole wants us to call it, X, is a microblogging platform centered around celebrity and brand culture. Specifically, the platform lures users by appearing to provide "backstage access" to their favorite brands or celebrities. Friends are replaced by "followers", and until 2022, celebrities were given elevated status on the platform. It is the 13th most popular social media website in the world. The prominence of celebrity gossip journalists on the platform means the platform has had an outsized role in the content of disreputable journalism outlets.

Attention-based culture over community

Twitter, along with similar social media websites are primarily a consumer culture where publicity is king (described in academic literature as a "brand public"). A "brand public" like Twitter is in contrast to a community. A community is where identity and belonging is more important than appearance and visibility. Value creation on Twitter is structured around affect rather than deliberation and values.

What this means is most interaction on Twitter is about jockeying for attention, relationships are shallow, and serve mostly to aid in self-publicity. The constant emotionally-charged attention-seeking resembles the communication of competitive and insecure adolescents. Discussions are obsessed with social status, and punishing or rewarding based on perceived status signals. The status signals are mediated by the parent platform. For example, users often tell each other that their opinion is not valid because of a lack of status signals on the platform ("ratios", "followers", etc.).

Social media networks that are similar to Twitter stigmatize a lack of social status outside the relevant social networks as well. Before the arrival of social media websites like Twitter, low social status was pitied or met with sympathy. This changed after the popularity of social media networks like Twitter. Due to being a marketplace where overall perceived attention is the main currency, words that often convey overall undesirability like 'incel' become slurs and an invitation to abuse that resembles high school bullying. The reification of bully culture in brand publics, coupled with the overall social disapproval of bully culture, creates echo chambers where prejudices further develop against marginalized groups. Prejudices are validated by the relevant factions primarily using the unreasonable narratives contained within the echo chamber bully cultures, and the celebrity gossip journalists who participate.

Former CEO

Twitter's former CEO and co-founder is Jack Dorsey, a promoter of diet woo and alt-med, and a coddler of far-right extremists.

Usage

Nevertheless, the short soundbite-esque nature of Twitter and the fact that mobile devices suit these short messages has made it very popular with social networking nerds. Its heavy users are really heavy, often posting, *ahem* "tweeting" dozens of times per day. It is most popular with celebrities or public figures who wish to interact with their fans — many "tweets" are actually posted by the people themselves, rather than managed by PR companies as typically on a relevant Facebook profile. Though, to manage the flood of replies and mentions popular accounts may receive, which may include rational critiques or personal abuse, Twitter provides a range of mechanisms to filter out notifications about some replies. These range from the relatively benign, such as filtering out replies from suspiciously simple accounts with no profile picture or that were recently created (targeted at trolls and bots), to the extreme, such as filtering out all replies from people the account does not follow (presumably targeted for use by people who want to live in a hermetically-sealed filter bubble — let's hope no politicians are using this "feature").

BBC technology columnist Bill Thompson raved about the site before it was seriously big, Ben Goldacre once had a spat with Gillian McKeith over a Twitter comment, and Brian Cox likes to constantly rant about science funding (and where his next Wonders filming spree will take him) via the site.

"Woofer" was an inevitable jab against Twitter's 140 (seriously, what the arse can you say in 140 characters?!?!) character-limit; the key point of Woofer was that you must have at least 1400 characters to make a post, leading to tl;dr all round — although one Woofer post per day would represent fewer characters and content than most serious Twitter users make in a month. In case you're wondering who came up with that stupid idea of a 140 character limit, it was Dorsey: Dorsey wrote software for dispatching taxis, which was transformed into Twitter.

Right-wing use

It was also Donald Trump's social network of choice, where he was known as 'Twitler', at least until January 8, 2021 when he got "permabanned" for inciting violence at the US Capitol insurrection, and later unbanned when Elon Musk bought the company. The Southern Poverty Law Center has argued that:

Twitter gave far-right extremists the platform they needed to plan an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and the website, if it maintains its current approach, will likely enable politically motivated violence again in the future.

Dorsey with Ali Alexander

Dorsey is a real-life friend of insurrection ringleader Ali Alexander ("Stop the Steal").

Twitter's own analysis of its platform found that in 6 out of 7 countries that it studied, right-leaning tweets are algorithmically amplified more often than left-leaning tweets.

As with all major social media networking sites, Twitter has done a thoroughly shitty job of policing itself against trolls, bots and hate campaigns. Twitter admitted to a Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 that Russian "fake-news" outlet RT purchased "$274,100 to promote 1,823 ads directed at followers of major media outlets" during the 2016 US presidential election, but nonetheless Senator Mark Warner was deeply disappointed by Twitter's presentation to the Committee regarding Russian influence, a presentation that was "inadequate on almost every level". Twitter moderators are powerless, and are bound to decisions made by a ideologically-driven libertarian leadership.

Nevertheless, Twitter officially bans its users from, for example, "affiliat[ing] with organizations that — whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform — use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes".

On October 30^th 2019 (perhaps to contrast current Facebook policy, who not only allows political ads, but refuses to take down political ads with known false content), Twitter announced that they would be banning all political ads on the platform. Predictably, this decision upset previous propagators or beneficiaries of this propaganda, such as Russian "fake-news" outlet RT and 2016 US presidential election winner Donald Trump.

Alongside Facebook and 8chan, the Christchurch terrorist attacks shooter Brenton Harrison Tarrant had a Twitter account.

Despite consistent right-wing dominance of the platform, right-wingers have constantly claimed that Twitter censors and oppresses them.

Musk buyout

See the main article on this topic: Elon Musk § Twitter

Angry birds coming to burn Twitter down, just in time for Christmas

Elon Musk, everyone's favorite memelord billionaire, purchased Twitter for $44 billion on October 28, 2022, Within days he began laying off employees in various company departments and reduced the site's speech restrictions, leading to an estimated 500% increase in usage of the word "nigger". Apparently, Musk has no immediate plans to deal with the trolls; in fact, Musk is turning Twitter into a free speech absolutist utopia where fringes, nazis, revisionists, and trolls get to do anything, except for all the exceptions, like when you are trolling Musk, know things better than him, or when you are working at the company at the time he acquires it — he has removed the entire former board, as well as members of councils that deal with content and ethics, thus declaring himself king of all with no one to stop him. Ethics is when Musk says so.

Suckers

In 2024, Musk was forced to publicly divulge by court order who the names of the investors in the company. This was at a time when the estimated value of the company had dropped by 70% (since the purchase by Musk at $44 billion, the company is privately held and not publicly traded). The investors include: Jack Dorsey, private venture capital funds, many publicly-traded mutual funds especially from Fidelity Investments, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud. Prior to the purchase, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who made the largest private investment of $2 billion, wrote, "I believe you will be an excellent leader for @Twitter to propel & maximise its great potential." Dorsey, who had also written glowingly about Musk as the future CEO, was the second highest private investor at $1 billion.