Photo illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: X/Daily Wire
Is Twitter back? The Atlantic’s Charlie Wurzel argues that while Twitter (now X) is a “hotbed of reckless speculation, indignant partisanship, and toxic information,” it has “become animated in ways that are hard to quantify” after weeks of major breaking news. It’s odd that the platform should attract an elite, Wurzel points out. News of Joe Biden’s presidential withdrawal was first shared and consumed on a service owned by a man who reportedly supports Trump and intends to financially support him. Platformer’s Casey Newton disagrees. Threads, he says, is on the rise. Meanwhile, X is a “sunk-cost social network” that occasionally regains relevance due to the old reactions of a political class that “has no interest in mastering new platforms.” Business Insider’s Hasan Chowdhury says recent events have “strengthened” X’s claim to be “the internet’s digital town square,” while Peter Kafka points out that despite X’s genuine appeal to some users, its business remains a total bust.
X is where history happens https://t.co/cUDWVWkpsq
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) July 21, 2024
Everyone is a little bit right here. X is the de facto breaking news platform and the most active place to stay on top of real-time happenings. This is less a virtue or a source of clear value and more an explanation for what makes the platform addictive. But that was the case even before Elon Musk bought it. Influencer networks and affinity groups across industries still exist, to varying degrees, on X, and new ones continue to form. For example, X has a huge influence on the public discussion about AI.
Yet X is small, and the various existing communities maintained by users unwilling to pay for the privilege of posting are losing energy, reach, and audience. Meta’s Threads is growing and becoming more useful for following current events, despite Meta’s insistence that it not be overwhelmed by politics, as Newton points out. But it’s still an incredibly strange place, where active user recruitment from other Meta properties combines with opaque algorithmic recommendations to frequently create a creepy, confusing experience. It’s more of a context-free Instagram comment section than a network of knowledgeable, well-informed contributors. Politically speaking, for the past few weeks, Threads has been the best place to read angry posts from liberals about cable news hosts and New York Times reporters not being supportive enough of the Democratic Party, and Joe Biden in particular. This answers a real demand, but it doesn’t make the strongest case for the centrality of the platform in American life. Bluesky has been publicly available since February, but it still feels like a niche forum. Facebook is in a mixed era. While awaiting execution, TikTok maintains influence that barely overlaps with X’s.
Musk’s platform is still going strong, but it’s also a very different place than it used to be. Let’s say you left the platform and logged back in recently. The easiest way to figure out how things have changed is to look at the main interface, which does a great job of contrasting the service’s past and future. On the left is the algorithmic “For You” feed, which X made the default for users in early 2023.
In retrospect, the push into auto-recommendations was an obvious move to boost engagement on a platform that had been stagnant before Musk’s acquisition. But it was also a risk. The feed is full of bait and viral images and videos ripped from other platforms. If you’ve ever shown any interest in news, it’s full of it, but the posts are old, sometimes days old, so it doesn’t do much to keep up with real-time events. Like algorithmic feeds on other platforms, it responds to your input: if you show interest in an account or topic, it’ll show you more of it. But it’s also full of people you never wanted to see—people you knew about but unfollowed.
Photo: Michael Schnell/X
The feed is very appealing — it clearly segments users based on demographics and interests, then serves them popular content they’re likely to watch. But it makes neo-X a relatively small, largely undifferentiated product among the algorithmic video giants. I’m not saying that the pre-Musk Twitter proposition (here, doom-scroll for hours in a low-engagement “social” environment that makes you feel lonely on the internet) was great, but it was at least unique. X’s “For You” feed is a second-rate time-killing toy tacked onto an increasingly slow real-time feed. (It’s also a vector through which the platform’s political pivot confronts users across the political spectrum, as some of the most viral content on the platform originates from the myriad accounts that have clustered around Musk himself.)
On TikTok, personalized content recommendations tend to make the platform feel even bigger than it is. But X does the opposite, failing to hide and sometimes emphasizing how narrow and small the app is becoming. Blue-check accounts constantly appear in various feeds, baiting engagement. If you share a funny TikTok with your friends from the “For You” page, there’s a good chance they won’t see it. Try doing the same with people who are still logged into X, and you start to get the impression that the platform’s recommendation algorithm doesn’t have all that much information. It’s a narrower, shallower service, more of an aggregator with a few “best of” feeds than a natural source of new content.
Next to the “Featured” tab is the user’s “Following” feed, which represents the other half of the Musk-era X: the old-fashioned chronological layout, where posts from people you actually follow are displayed in order of posting. As long as X still functions as a news platform, this is the reason, but as with the algorithmic version, it’s not a particularly good story. Longtime users are posting less because there is less to gain. Visibility of posts approaches zero unless you pay to have the blue checkmark. And new users, especially those hoping to make money from X’s new revenue-sharing program, know they’re posting with algorithmic promotion in mind. People and organizations who felt they had to post to Twitter’s common real-time feed in the past few years have less reason to do so. As Newton suggests, those who are still there are often posting out of inertia.
So Twitter is back, but it’s also in decline. The new X is going strong, while its twin brother Twitter isn’t doing so well. By historical and general social media standards, this isn’t a good story. And it’s not going according to the plan laid out after the acquisition. If anything, it’s less of an “all-purpose app” than it was before. It’s changing politically, but not becoming more diverse, and it’s less relevant as a place to make payments, date, find a job, or communicate privately and securely. In contrast, if you’re drawn to the platform from a more purely ideological perspective, you’re probably pretty happy with the situation and see X as a righting of Twitter’s wrongs, a politically corrected or purged version of a service that was hopelessly captured by dark forces and had to be saved by a reformist billionaire.
In other words, think of something like Elon Musk. For Musk, X has a lot of really cool features. That has always been the case, but now there are even more. X is a place where you can exert political influence not just by your message, but by your choices of what to promote and what to censor. X is a place where you can promote your company, where millions of people will listen and thousands of fans will rush to your defense. A place where all your jokes are funny, all your ideas are great, and all your opponents are part of a conspiracy. Or, more specifically, a place where you make the rules. Whereas Twitter was a place where an executive’s expression of political opinion was evidence of a conspiracy, X is a place where the owner’s political support is a heroic necessity. Whereas Twitter was a place where the lack of advertising was evidence of a bad product, X is a place where advertisers who refuse to spend money on the platform can be legitimately sued.
Jordan Peterson tries to sell the ‘carnivore diet’ to Elon Musk in this insane 80 seconds pic.twitter.com/heTCKNEfX1
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) July 23, 2024
Some of X’s new features are of a more personal nature. On Twitter, misgendering transgender people violated community guidelines. X is a platform where “cisgender” is considered offensive, and Musk, through affiliated and friendly media, is free to misgender and deadname his own transgender child, as Jordan Peterson, a seriously unwell man, did in a dismal live interview in front of millions. This is exactly what his most important customer wanted all along, and exactly how he envisioned it in his mind: a cybertruck of a social platform, a tool of revenge, and the only way to fight the “virus of the woke mind” that “killed” his daughter. The question of whether Twitter is over in general is interesting, but oddly irrelevant. By the assessment of its owner, Twitter is back in full force.
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