If you use Twitter, the service that not so long ago was the best way to take in breaking news and find audiences for serious conversations, you may have found it substantially less useful in the past year. Over this past weekend you found it almost unusable. On Saturday, everything melted down. Thousands of users reported that they had major issues using the platform, including an inability to access any tweets or to post their own tweets – so, basically, everything for which one might want to use Twitter.
On Saturday, Musk announced that Twitter was limiting the ways all users could access tweets “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”. In other words, Musk was blaming commercial services that might want to scrape tweets and incorporate them into machine-learning models. There is no reason to believe this is actually happening, but Musk’s longtime hostility to artificial intelligence must have led him to deploy such services as likely suspects to blame for Twitter’s fragility.
Then Musk announced that accounts that didn’t pay for the company’s Twitter Blue service (almost all of them) would be limited to viewing a total of 600 posts a day, while accounts that did pay up would be limited to 6,000. Newly created Twitter accounts would be limited to viewing 300 posts a day. Later on Saturday, after significant public ridicule and anger, Musk twice raised the limits, as if that would appease users. As of Sunday night the limits stood at 10,000 posts a day for Blue subscribers, 1,000 a day for free accounts and 500 for newly created free accounts.
Such chaotic decisions certainly cast further doubt on Musk’s competence. There is no way he ran any predictive analyses to come up with such policies and numbers. He’s just winging it – poorly.
Over the past year, since the former genius assumed complete control of Twitter, he has expressed hostility toward its most loyal and active classes of user, including journalists, political and social activists, and the very businesses Twitter depends on for advertising revenue. By driving away advertisers from an already shaky and poorly run firm, Musk has lurched toward a desperate but ultimately futile move: to coerce (not encourage) users to subscribe to Twitter Blue, a special tier of membership that costs $8 (£6) a month, or 38.29 reis in Brazil, the third-largest market for Twitter after the US and Japan. Those 38.29 reis are about half what most people in Brazil pay each month for internet access itself and is beyond a reasonable expense for the vast majority of people there.
Imagine being the sort of person who decides that even $8 a month is worth paying for a service that just keeps getting worse. Imagine wanting to pay money to the violent and oppressive government of Saudi Arabia, one of the major investors Musk brought in on the deal. This is what Musk is demanding of Twitter users, most of whom just want to keep up with what their favourite celebrities are doing and get alerted to breaking news in their area.
While promising Twitter Blue users a slightly less annoying experience and the potential to reach a larger audience than plebeian users might, Musk has degraded the service for everyone. Whether because of indignation, arrogance, ignorance or desperation, Musk has fired more than half of the staff that it took to keep Twitter running and growing at its peak. Entire teams like trust and safety, which tried to limit threats and hate speech, have been gutted.
Now, no one is even trying to make the experience of Twitter pleasant or unthreatening. Many on the technical side of the firm have left or been fired as well, leaving a skeletal group working excessively to keep Twitter running on fewer servers. To compound all of this, Musk has decided he is above such mortal concerns as paying one’s bills. So he has stopped paying for office space while demanding workers stop working from home. More crucially to users, Musk has stopped paying for the very servers Twitter needs to provide consistent service to its 230 million daily – but frustrated – active users.
If Musk were a clever or brilliant thinker, as some people still believe despite all available evidence, one could assume that he has some master plan or that he’s making strategic decisions about the scope, scale, design and functionality of the service. He is not. He has not. He is running Twitter into the ground like Donald Trump ran the US government – fueled by fits of indignation and paranoia. Since the day he proposed taking over, Musk has demonstrated no interest or expertise in how such a service might enhance the lives of its users or at least make money to stay afloat. He’s run it on debt – debt accrued from some of the most dangerous people in the world.
With the new debt Musk took on to complete the purchase of Twitter stock and take the company private, the company’s annual debt payments ballooned to about $1bn a year. Yet the company’s operations in 2021 generated about $630m in cashflow. And those were better times for online advertising, and a better time to be a user of or advertiser on Twitter.
Twitter was never great. The company never had the staff, technology, policies or resources it would have taken to rid the experience of harassment, hatred and calls for violence. I have argued that the very nature of services like Facebook and Twitter make that goal impossible. Social media are, on balance and by design, bad for human beings. But Twitter did amplify the communicative goals of some non-Nazi users, such as social-justice activists. It offered important information during emergencies and breaking news moments (along with the predictable misinformation that flows in those moments). Twitter was at least useful and trying to do less harm before Musk took it over. Now it’s solely the refuge of white supremacists like Tucker Carlson, exiled from even some of the least respectable edges of the public sphere. But Musk loves the guy. So he’s the new star of Twitter, enhancing no one’s quality of life and enlightening no one.
How long can this Twitter last? It must be a matter of months away from total collapse. Of course, I’ve been saying that for a year now, and I have no special insight into its financial matters. Now, however, things seem to be in a death spiral that is more than financial. It’s technical. While Musk tried his best to distract critics by blaming artificial intelligence companies allegedly scraping Twitter, a glitch in Twitter itself meant its computers were demanding data from its servers in an infinite loop. So Twitter was killing itself. It seems to be a mercy killing.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is also Guardian US columnist
