The strange revelations making me rethink Twitter

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This was published 10 months ago

The strange revelations making me rethink Twitter

After a decade and a half of posting, one regular Twitter user ponders what the social media site has really given us – and what it’s taken away.

By Willy Staley

Musk’s takeover of Twitter has strained the sense of conviviality that made it feel like a party in the first place.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter has strained the sense of conviviality that made it feel like a party in the first place.Credit: Jamie Chung/Trunk Archive/Snapper Images

This story is part of the May 13 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 16 stories.

Elon Musk has done many things to Twitter, both the app and the business, during his more than six months as chief executive and owner. He has laid off more than half the staff, changed the interface and functionality of the product and aggressively pushed users to sign up for a paid subscription version of the service. He says that usage has gone up, but because he has taken the company private, we only have his word on that. According to most estimates, ad spending has plummeted. Musk himself has reportedly estimated that the company is now worth about $US20 billion ($30 billion), a negative 55 per cent return. He has, meanwhile, enlisted a small group of journalists – many of whom have taken a political journey similar to Musk’s in recent years – to sift through company emails and Slacks [the business messaging service] in an effort to reveal overreach on the part of the old regime in its management of the global conversation. They published reams of lightly redacted emails, showing regular correspondence between Twitter’s trust-and-safety team and the FBI, and other organs of the state, which apparently spend a considerable amount of time scrutinising individual Twitter accounts.

Musk’s takeover of the platform has strained the sense of conviviality that made Twitter feel like a party in the first place. The site feels a little emptier, though certainly not dead. More like the part of the dinner party when only the serious drinkers remain. Whisky is being poured into wine glasses, and the cheese plate has become an ashtray. It’s still a great time – indeed, it’s a little looser – but it also feels as if many of us are just avoiding the inevitable. Eventually, we’ll scrape the plates, load the dishwasher and leave the pans to soak. It’s possible the party will stretch on until sunrise, when the more sensible guests will return. But for now, someone just turned up the lights, and it’s probably time to ask ourselves: “What exactly have we been doing here for the last decade and a half?”

Since becoming Twitter CEO, Elon Musk’s public persona has transformed from beloved entrepreneur to less beloved culture warrior.

Since becoming Twitter CEO, Elon Musk’s public persona has transformed from beloved entrepreneur to less beloved culture warrior.Credit: Getty Images


Many narratives have developed over the years to explain what Twitter has been doing to us. There was, in the wake of Donald Trump’s November 2016 election as US president, the focus on Russian “bots” and “trolls” – two words often used interchangeably, though they mean totally different things – sowing discord and amplifying divisive rhetoric. As the Trump years progressed, this evolved into a broader concern about “disinformation”, “misinformation” and whether – and how – Twitter should seek to stop them. And behind all this lurked vague concerns about “the algorithm”, the exotic mathematical force accused of steering hypnotised users into right-wing extremism, or imprisoning people in a cocoon of smug liberalism or, somehow, both.

Those narratives all express fears about what happens when people consume information online, but they have little of use to say about how or why all that information is produced in the first place. After all, everything you read on Twitter, whether it comes from the president of the United States or your local dogcatcher, is a result of the process known as posting. And only a small proportion of users post.

There is a lot of research on this topic, and it can be bracing reading for the Twitter addict. In 2021, the Washington, DC-based Pew Research Centre took a close look at about 1000 US-based accounts, plucked out of a bigger survey of the site. This sample was split into two: the “most active users” who made up just 25 per cent of the group, and the rest. Statistically speaking, no one in the bottom 75 per cent even posted at all: they produced a median of zero posts a month. They also checked the site far less frequently and were more likely to find it uncivil.

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There’s also some data about the heavy users, and though Pew would not approve, let’s pretend, for our purposes, that it can be used to make a composite sketch of one. We’ll call him Joe Sixpost. Joe produces about 65 tweets a month, an average of two a day. Only 14 per cent of his output is his own material, original stand-alone tweets posted to the timeline; half of his posts are retweets of stuff other people posted, and the remainder are quote-tweets or replies to other tweets. None of this stuff travels far. Joe has a median of 230 followers, and on average his efforts earn him 37 likes and one retweet a month. Nevertheless, it is heavy users like this – just the top quartile – who produced 97 per cent of the larger group’s posts.

Let me be frank: these are pathetic numbers. Over the last 48 hours, I have made 14 posts. Five were “original” posts to my timeline. I also retweeted a writer I work with, my twin brother and [the US political activist] Grover Norquist, and replied to tweets replying to my own. Thus, in two days, I put myself on track to make 210 posts a month. (I won’t mention the like and retweet numbers, but suffice it to say I had individual posts that absolutely rinsed Joe Sixpost’s monthly counts.) And this was a period during which I took care of my young child, did garbage duty in my building, tried to go grocery shopping but discovered I had a flat tyre, walked to a different store, cooked dinner (that’s right), read, watched Party Down, slept, got my kid to daycare, changed the flat tyre and worked on this article.

I didn’t even think I was on Twitter very much. But because my posts go out to so many more accounts than even an “active user” like Joe Sixpost’s do – by a factor of 100 – I’d still do more to shape reality on the platform even if I posted less frequently than he did. Which, as we’ve established, I don’t.

Why has a small sliver of humanity taken it upon themselves to heap their thoughts into this hopper every day?

People afflicted with this unyielding desire to post are rare enough that we probably aren’t easily captured in studies like Pew’s. If you pick 1000 people at random, you might not find many of us, and if you do, our derangement will be smoothed out into averages and obscured by medians, blinding you to the fact that the bulk of your Twitter reading comes from a tiny minority of the population that shares this peculiar deficiency with me. When we talk about the problems created by Twitter, we focus on what happens when people read the wrong sort of post, like disinformation from a malign actor. If we consider the posting side of things at all, it is to lament the excesses of cancel culture – typically from the receiving end.

But if we really want to understand what Twitter has done to us, surely it would make more sense to account for the millions and millions of more ordinary posts the platform generates by design. Why has a small sliver of humanity taken it upon themselves to heap their thoughts into this hopper every day?

Part of answering this question involves realising that a tweet isn’t just a matter of one person speaking and others listening. Kevin Munger, an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University, thinks of this confusion as the overhang of the “broadcast paradigm” in an era when it is no longer relevant. Many people conceive of tweets as analogous to TV or newspaper or radio – that “there are people who tweet, there are people who read the tweets,” as Munger puts it. “And the tweet is just text, right, and it’s static.”

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But there is no such separation between creator and consumer, and that’s not what a tweet is. “If you look at a tweet, it’s always already encoding audience feedback,” Munger points out. Right beneath the text of the tweet is information about what the network thinks of it: the numbers of replies, retweets and likes. In fact, a tweet contains layers of information beyond that: not just how many people liked it or replied, but who, and what they said, and how they present themselves, and whom they follow, and who follows them, and so on. Every post contains within it a unique core sample of the network and its make-up.

Munger is highly pessimistic about our ability to use Twitter to debate or deliberate anything of importance. Instead, he suggests, we use the site as a “vibes-detection machine” – a means of discovering subtle shifts in sentiment within our local orbits; a way to suss out, in an almost post-rational way, which ideas, symbols and beliefs pair with one another.


Twitter took off first with geeks in San Francisco, and then with people in the tech-media-music orbit at the South by Southwest event in Texas in 2007. From there, it continued to annex populations prone to graphomania (reporters, rappers, academics) and those that just had more things to say than opportunities to say them (comedians, editors, TV writers, lawyers). Twitter quickly figured out that its value lay in its ability to surface conversations: What was the world talking about? In 2008, it began plumbing its depths to identify trends. These were the early days of the Big Data era, and the idea was that within all the chatter could be found some hidden rhythm, a form of crowd wisdom. It wasn’t long before people got the idea that they could harness Twitter’s fire hose of information to do things like trade stocks – one hedge fund, started in 2011, promised 15 to 20 per cent returns based on its algorithmic ability to divine market movements. It shuttered after a month.

Twitter’s takeover of the media class was rapid. In April 2009, The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said that she “would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account”; she signed up three months later to promote her column.

Around the same time, a Time cover story noted that Twitter users had begun using the site as a “pointing device” and sharing longer-form content. (“It’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms [cereal] habit.” ) This would make it an incredible way to keep up on the news – and absolutely irresistible to journalists. By the next year, The New York Times media reporter David Carr was writing an ode to the site, correctly predicting it was more than a fad and lauding it for both its relative civility and its “obvious utility” for information-gathering. “If all kinds of people are pointing at the same thing at the same instant,” he wrote, “it must be a pretty big deal.”

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There was also an enormous expansion in web media, with BuzzFeed, Vice and others pouring truckloads of venture capital into the field. And though Twitter never drove much traffic, it was nevertheless important for journalists to be there because everyone else was there; this was where your articles would be read and digested by your peers and betters (as well as, theoretically, the reading public). It was doubly important because of how precarious these new jobs were. Your Twitter profile was also your calling card, potentially a life-raft to a new job. The platform was an extremely fraught sort of LinkedIn, one you would use to publicly waste company time.

But this journalistic swarming instinct made Twitter an ideal place for activists to get a message out. If there is one good thing that can be said about Twitter, it’s that it really was democratising: it allowed the previously voiceless to walk right up to the powerful and put stuff right in front of their faces, at any time of day. The Green Revolution in Iran, the Tahrir Square protests and Occupy Wall Street – all of these made use of Twitter in creative ways. Two of the biggest social movements of the past decade are often rendered as one word with a hashtag attached to it. The real action of Black Lives Matter may have taken place in the streets, and the long-delayed consequences of #MeToo delivered in boardrooms or courtrooms, but these movements couldn’t have begun if they could not corral and excite latent political energies via social platforms.

It allowed the previously voiceless to walk right up to the powerful and put stuff right in front of their faces, at any time of day.

Really, Twitter was good for getting any sort of message out there. Governors and senators, Shaquille O’Neal and Sears; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chrissy Teigen; the Dalai Lama and the guy who does Dilbert – all could use the same exact tools to be heard, and to hear, at all hours of the day. For some, it was their job to get a message out; for others, an ancillary goal; for others still, a reluctant undertaking done in the name of relevance. In any event, the barrier between work and goofing around grew dangerously thin, especially as more influential people and entities arrived. Because as soon as Twitter began bringing all these people together, it amounted to an irresistible target. Twitter was an exceptional tool, above all else, for making jokes. Some groups elevated it to an art, profoundly transforming the folkways and language of the platform – “Black Twitter” chief among them. There was also “Weird Twitter”, an unfortunate label that refers as much to a specific group of people as to the sensibility they shared. What Weird Twitter posters had in common, beyond being (mostly) funny, was a special brain damage that granted them access to the hidden frequencies of the internet.

But if you were good at the game, it could be good for you, both on Twitter and off. People got commissions and book deals – not many, but enough. Some people lost their jobs – not many, but enough. A couple of people got TV shows out of it. Once, someone told a story so wild it was turned into a feature film. Hell, one guy even went and got himself elected president.

The net effect of all of this has been a buggy site, and one that feels less alive. Not just because so many influential people have departed but also because Musk broke the spell.

The net effect of all of this has been a buggy site, and one that feels less alive. Not just because so many influential people have departed but also because Musk broke the spell.Credit: Jamie Chung/Trunk Archive/Snapper Images

The election of Donald Trump made Twitter an extremely fraught environment. Did you hate the way the media reported on him? They were all there to tweet at about it. Did you blame everything that was happening on people slightly to your left? Slightly to your right? A random podcaster? Someone you didn’t know existed until five seconds ago? They were there, too. And, of course, so was the president. Some of his opponents suspected his election might be the fault of the platform itself. This idea gave us a solid six years of discourse on Russian bots and trolls and disinformation, though none of this, according to a recent study in Nature, had any meaningful effect on voters’ 2016 decision-making. In all the bickering, it was easy to lose track of what was keeping us on Twitter in the first place.

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One compelling theory comes from Chris Bail, a sociology professor at Duke University in North Carolina, who began studying Twitter in the years when these debates were raging. Bail was especially curious about the “filter bubble”, the idea that social media platforms encircle users with opinions they share, causing them to be less amenable to arguments from the other side. Bail had read research showing that social media has actually given people a more diverse information diet. “Even convincing people that that’s true is really hard,” he told me, because there is an enormous apparatus of talking heads telling them otherwise.

So Bail and his colleagues designed an experiment to test the filter bubble. They exposed partisan Twitter users to a bot that would retweet counter-partisan speech 24 times a day, for a month, and interviewed participants before and after. In the end, they showed that the reality was stranger than the theory: the more attention respondents paid to the bots, the more entrenched they became in their beliefs. These results were especially true of conservatives. Bail even saw some participants yelling at the experiment’s bots. “This happened so often that three of the most extreme conservatives in our study began following each other,” Bail writes in his book Breaking the Social Media Prism. “The trio teamed up to attack many of the messages our liberal bot retweeted for an entire week, often pushing each other to make increasingly extreme criticism as time passed.”

Bail argues that Twitter is a “prism” that bends both the depiction of reality you see through it and your own efforts to show who you are to the world. The platform, Bail writes, taps into the human desire to “present different versions of ourselves, observe what other people think of them and revise our identities accordingly”. People like to think of social media as a mirror, he told me: “I can see what’s going on, and I can see my place in what’s going on.” But Twitter is not a random sampling of reality. Almost all the feedback you receive on the site comes from its most active users. “And the most active social media users,” Bail says, “are a weird group of people.”

Bail argues that Twitter is a “prism” that bends both the depiction of reality you see through it and your own efforts to show who you are to the world.

One thing Kevin Munger pointed out to me is that Twitter users are running Bail’s experiment on one another constantly. Pervasive quote-tweet dunking, for example, is often used to highlight the most galling ideas coming from one’s political foes, feeding users outrageous caricatures of the other side. There are also numerous accounts – Libs of TikTok most notorious among them – that exist for this sole purpose: to drag speech out of its intended context in another gamified discourse, across the partisan divide, to enrage people. Bail ran his experiment for only a month; imagine doing this for about a decade.

Bail told me that before he settled on the prism, he considered sonar as his central metaphor, because of the way Twitter allows users to send out a message and see what bounces back. This is a helpful way of thinking about Trump, whose Twitter habit was largely seen as a sideshow, a means of circumventing the press or just evidence of his terrible impulse control. It was all those things, of course. But this is also the man who discovered, lurking within the rot of the two-party system, a strange new shape in the electorate. Should we regard it as pure coincidence that he spent all those years on Twitter, with an enormous following and the sonar capabilities of an Ohio-class submarine? Even Trump’s campaign rallies and governing style had this highly provisional, posting-like rhythm to them: he tried things out, saw what worked and pocketed those moves. Is it so hard to believe that the image-obsessed salesman, up in his gilded cockpit in the vibes-detection machine, was learning something about what people wanted to hear?

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Before he switched to his own social media platform, Donald Trump used Twitter as a means to circumnavigate the press – and, like others, as a “vibes-detection machine”.

Before he switched to his own social media platform, Donald Trump used Twitter as a means to circumnavigate the press – and, like others, as a “vibes-detection machine”.Credit: Getty Images

We could ask similar questions about Musk, whose increased exposure to the site has coincided with his transformation from beloved entrepreneur to substantially less beloved culture warrior. One of Bail’s chief observations about Twitter is that its prismatic qualities generate a strong effect on users – its feedback makes very clear who your friends and enemies are. This can act as a sort of centrifugal force, pushing people deeper into the belief structures of their “team”, and pushing moderates out of the conversation entirely.

We can’t know exactly why Musk seems to have become so engaged with culture-war topics, but Bail’s ideas suggest one explanation, that through the prism, he saw the most disingenuous arguments from both sides over the most contentious issues of the day, his own behaviour very much included. And one side welcomed him while the other rejected him.

Now that Musk owns the site, he has repeatedly stated that his goal is to bring back “free speech” and he has tweeted several times about the “woke mind virus” that he believes threatens civilisation. It seems he thinks it might live within his new plaything, and can be dislodged if he turns it upside-down and shakes it just right. But it’s not clear he knows where it is: was it in the staff?

He has laid off most of them now; many others have left of their own volition. Was it in their content-moderation team? He has treated Twitter’s San Francisco offices like Stasi HQ, revealing the inner workings of the previous regime. Is it in the algorithm or the user experience? He has changed all that too, and continues to tinker with them, seemingly based on passing whims and grudges – or sometimes inscrutable urges. He added more metrics to every tweet, briefly changed the site’s logo to a shiba inu dog and obscured the “W” on the sign that hangs from the company’s headquarters. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment; Twitter’s press email auto-replied, as it apparently does to all incoming messages.)

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The net effect of all of this has been a buggy site, and one that feels less alive. Not just because so many influential people have departed but also because Musk broke the spell. You can no longer believe that this platform offers an unobstructed view to the outside world, if you ever did, now that his hands have so thoroughly smudged the glass.

It’s hard to look back on nearly a decade-and-a-half of posting without feeling something like regret. Not regret that I’ve harmed my reputation with countless people who don’t know me, and some who do, though there is that. Not regret that I’ve experienced all the psychic damage described herein, though there is that too. And not even regret that I could have been doing something more productive with my time – of course there’s that, but whatever.

What’s disconcerting is just how easy it was to pass all the hours this way. The world sort of falls away when you’re looking at the feed. For all the time I spent, I didn’t even really put that much into it.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The New York Times Magazine. © The New York Times Company 2023.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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