For months now, Twitter users have been anticipating the platform’s demise. The technology is buggy and often appears to be breaking down. There’s a new corporate crisis every week. It’s a strange feeling to witness the death spiral of a major social media platform – not a planned shutdown or an attempted government ban, but a social network becoming a ghost town before our very eyes.
This week Mark Zuckerberg successfully launched Threads, a Twitter competitor that claimed 70m sign-ups by its second day. It has been widely interpreted as a potential death blow to an already struggling platform.
For journalists, who moved onto Twitter early and helped define it as the premier digital location for news to be made and broken, the death of Twitter would be big – the end of an era. That’s especially true for journalists like us, who entered the profession after Twitter’s 2006 launch and built our careers at digital outlets, where Twitter defined the stories we covered and the rhythm of our days.
Twitter isn’t just any network: it’s the social media company that was central to the past decade of global political activism, a platform that helped fuel uprisings, insurrections and at least one pivotal American presidency.
Now, Twitter is handing us another assignment: how to write a eulogy for a platform that generated so much hope and harm.
@kari_paul, tech reporter, joined Twitter in May 2011
I came into my journalism career in that rosy era when we thought social media might actually be good for the world. Between the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Twitter had become a hotbed for resistance and a beacon of hope for journalists and activists alike. As a young news intern, I obsessively searched the platform to gather information about what was happening on the ground, trying to prove myself and make it in my career while believing wholeheartedly in the power of free information to change the world.
Like many others, in the years since, I have watched with dread as the internet has instead facilitated the slow and painful destruction of democracy, attacks on safety, and a dissolution of our trust in one another – and in reality itself.
In many ways, Twitter’s fall from grace coincided with my evolution from a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed journalism intern to a jaded tech reporter, all too aware of the ways in which unbridled surveillance capitalism has been allowed to destroy and divide us.
Meta has promised to make Threads, its new Twitter alternative, a place for “positive” discourse and “kindness”. After reporting extensively on the company’s alleged lies, its creation of a toxic online environment for teens and others with eating disorders, and its role in fomenting the attacks on the Capitol and other divisive and violent events, I have my doubts.
But the nature of our current tech-monopoly landscape means that we don’t have many alternatives. While social media has become a public utility, used to communicate disaster alerts, emergency information and the local news needed to make democracy run smoothly, it is still privately held and operated. We are left relying on companies chasing profit to protect values that are fundamental to public health and safety. To change this would require a restructuring of the entire system, a revolution of sorts. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a public forum to do so? Say, a micro-blogging platform like Twitter?
@loisbeckett, LA correspondent, joined Twitter in February 2009
In late 2018, I wrote a news article about staying off social media for a week and only reading books. This was supposed to teach me that Twitter was the fast food of the brain, distracting and shallow and that I would feel better if I consumed only serious literature and nonfiction. The stunt backfired: living alone for days in a picturesque cabin, reading a dozen well-researched volumes, only reminded me of how dazzling and entertaining and unexpected Twitter could be.
Quicker thoughts were not necessarily worse ones: there was a salutary discipline to being limited to 140 characters. Yes, some of the conventions of the platform were ridiculous. Twitter thread culture was demeaning, like watching an adult cut up food into pieces, open their eyes wide, waggle a fork and make outraged airplane noises to trick other users into opening their mouths. I had done this myself sometimes: it worked, and it was embarrassing.
But Twitter also felt big, like the world is big: a technology for a world of scale and surprise, a digital metropolis, in contrast to the walled provincial suburbs of Facebook or Instagram. Yes, it could be a place of intense and unpredictable harassment, full of violent threats and a stunning lack of basic interpersonal etiquette, but it was also entertaining and everyone was there.
This was the platform where me and many of my colleagues hung out together, at any hour of the day or night, no matter our actual physical location. Twitter was our Paris bar in the 1920s, our Berlin cafe, the place where we made friends and impressed potential bosses and tested ideas and shouted at each other, where we savored the moment when a whole corner of the bar fell silent as we talked and then everyone started to repeat what we had said.
My love for Twitter is also accompanied by sadness. By late 2018, it was already clear that the platform was on a dangerous trajectory, and that the place I had wasted the first decade of my adulthood would soon become a place where it was no longer safe to go. There had been neo-Nazis in the bar for a long time, and increasingly there were more of them, and it seemed likely, one way or another, that the brownshirts would take over the place.
As Twitter becomes a failed state, I’ve ducked my head inside a few platforms, but the decor is tacky and the ideas are stale. I expect I will find my way instead to some new placid digital garden, where elderly media professionals like myself can trade memories of the amazing dunks and main characters of years past and avoid talking too much about the present.
@JMBooyah, Senior tech reporter, joined Twitter in 2011
Twitter used to contain multitudes. For us emerging reporters, it was the place where you could post your unhinged thoughts right after sharing your latest investigative story. It was the place you went to find real-time updates on major news events and takes on the latest media drama. It could fill you with deep, existential dread and unbridled joy in a single scroll. Careers were launched and killed on the platform.
It was never all good. But it was where we talked, laughed, cried, dunked on people, got dunked on, met people, found jobs, followed each other’s work and promoted our accomplishments for many years.
Twitter felt egalitarian. If it was funny, clever, informative and hit at the right time, your tweet could go viral. A young reporter’s big breaking news story had almost as much chance of being picked up and spreading like wildfire through the platform than the scoops of well-known names with many thousands more followers.
And Twitter was addictive. I used to have the app deleted because I needed to fight the compulsion to constantly check it.
Today, Twitter is a ghost town. The spice, the joy, the pressure to be funny has gone. Many users are mad. Paid subscribers get top billing – their tweets are pushed to the tops of people’s feeds, they get to tweet more characters. People who no one would ever question whether they are who they say they are have their accounts verified, you know, just in case. Twitter always had a tendency to be an echo chamber, but you got to choose the one you wanted to be in. Today it’s still an echo chamber, but the main voice you’re hearing is Elon Musk’s.
Is this the end of Twitter? Maybe the Twitter clones will not be as great as they seem? Will there come a day we’ll revert back to the platform we’ve known for so long? I’m not exactly hopeful.
@abenewrites, gun violence reporter, joined Twitter in 2010
I am here to pre-mourn the messiest place on the net.
Joining Twitter was a natural next step for teenaged me, once I realized that many of my aunts, uncles and nosy church ladies were on Facebook and watching my posts. At first, I mainly followed people from school and my city, but as time went on I discovered Black Twitter and the platform became the uncensored place where I could follow the local and national mess.
Not only could I watch former high school peers argue via quote tweets, I could also watch my favorite (and least favorite) personalities from the worlds of hip-hop and reality TV air out their conflicts without clever edits from producers or having their swearwords covered by bleeps.
And it never really ceased to play that role for me. Yes, I changed my tone – swearing less and completely cutting my use of the N-word, because I was in fact a journalist who eventually got a blue check mark and had to maintain a thin mystique of professionalism. But I discovered a whole new world of messiness. Journo-Twitter was a newfound place for gossip and snide remarks about tone-deaf articles. It was also a place of community – one where I watched major news moments like the 2016 election, cycles of protests over police brutality and racial injustice and the interstate chronicles of a stripper named Zola unfold. It’s those moments I will be incredibly grateful for.
I am one of a dwindling number of media folks who plan to continue to use Twitter until it becomes an unusable cesspool of disinformation and antagonism. Though some well-known Black Twitter figures bounced from the platform as soon as Musk took over, they couldn’t take the spirit and fun of Black Twitter with them. I still find great value in reading what other lovers of 90 Day Fiancé, the Real Housewives and Love and Marriage: Huntsville have to say about the latest shenanigans. And it still functions as a primary place for me to share my work and be exposed to articles that I may have missed otherwise.
My journey with Twitter has been long and strange and I am not yet ready to jump from the sinking ship.
