Downward angle icon Downward angle icon. Elon Musk may be doing his best to ruin Twitter, but people still flock there when there’s big news. DADO RUVIC/Reuters Twitter remains sticky under Elon Musk, even for people who aren’t happy that he owns it. Joe Biden’s tweeting his withdrawal from the election doesn’t prove the point. But the fact that pundits like Ezra Klein are still there (or were there until recently) speaks volumes.
Is Twitter, which Elon Musk bought for $44 billion and renamed to X, back?
On the one hand, that’s not the case at all.
What Musk buys is only worth a fraction of what he paid for it, because it depends on advertising. Advertisers don’t want to go near Musk because he continues to do Musk-like things, like calling for the execution or jailing of people who don’t support his favorite bills, or obsessing about the race of actors who play cartoon characters. That’s not going to change, because Musk seems neither able nor interested in changing it.
On the other hand, maybe a little? At least measured by atmosphere?
As my colleague Hasan Chowdhury points out, Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race on Sunday with a message posted to Twitter/X, much to Musk’s delight. But Biden, like many social media users, is promiscuous. The same message was also posted to Threads and Instagram. (Note: Twitter is much smaller than platforms like Instagram and TikTok.)
A more telling sign is how people other than the president of the United States have been using Twitter in recent months as the news cycle has again entered unprecedented territory: They’ve been using it to joke, debate and even share useful information.
And the most significant sign to me was the re-emergence of Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and podcaster (and longtime colleague of mine at Vox Media) who stopped posting on Twitter in October 2022, just before Musk finalized the acquisition, but returned earlier this month as the Biden controversy swirled.
And he hit the ground running, littering the platform just like he did back in the day with opinion pieces, retweets, and some very helpful analytical reports.
Again, Klein has a huge following as a New York Times columnist and a popular podcast host, and he sent shock waves through the political world in February when he argued that Biden should drop out of the race and explained how that would happen.
Now he’s here like everyone else, posting and scrolling. What happened? Why did he come back, and is he here to stay?
I asked him via email, and here is his full response:
“I did take a break from Twitter for two years, then went back for a few weeks, and now I’m off again. Twitter is a kind of trade-off for me: it gets me caught up in rapidly changing emotional waves that make it hard to think clearly, deeply, or independently. If I’d been addicted to Twitter in February, I’m not sure I would have written my original series on why Biden should step down. But the last few weeks have really required me to get caught up in the rapidly changing emotional waves!”
I try to see it as a tool, and most of the time I don’t think it’s good for my mindset, but there are moments when you have to think of it that way.
I think we’re seeing something else here: Threads said they didn’t want to be a news outlet, but they got their wish.”
A few things to note here:
I can really relate to people who leave Twitter, come back, have mixed feelings about it, and then leave again. I was asking Klein about why he posts on Twitter as a creator. But he was talking about his reasons for posting on Twitter as a consumer of Twitter: to connect. The truth is, many of the most engaged Twitter users are a mix of both, absorbing what people are posting and occasionally reacting to it. (The vast majority of Twitter users, like all social media users, rarely post. This is well-known across all social media platforms, but for Musk, it seemed like a new thing until he bought the site.) I have a lot of issues with Threads, but I spent some time there on Sunday, and it wasn’t exactly a news-free zone. Still, I spent more time on Twitter.
Ultimately, I believe the correct way to describe Twitter’s current situation is not a full-scale resurgence, but rather a period of uptick — the way a news channel like CNN sees ratings spike when something big happens, then drops to modest ratings when the dust settles — which has been one of the claims Twitter has made from the beginning.
So we’re talking about maintaining the status quo: For a relatively small number of people, Twitter was useful, fun, and addictive before Musk bought it, and, despite everything, it still is.
I don’t think that’s what Musk was thinking when he bought it two years ago, and I’m not all that keen on using it myself, but I don’t see it going anywhere.