What Was Twitter?
Read the transcript from our forum on the past and future of online life
Last week, The Drift convened some of our favorite internet users at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute for a wide ranging discussion about the website formerly known as Twitter. Nostalgia is not an emotion we indulge frequently at The Drift, as associate editor
noted in her introductory remarks, but as we planned the event, it was hard not to feel sentimental. Twitter was where we found our very first readers during the pandemic. It functioned as a comment section for every piece, and a place to complain about the lines for our parties. Today, things are a little different on the platform. Like many other media outlets, we’ve come to know the frustration of publishing a great new essay, the product of months of diligent work, only to see it barely make a ripple in X’s sea of slop.But our goal wasn’t just to hold a wake for our erstwhile favorite website. We also wanted to better understand how Twitter came to feel integral to the practices of journalism and politics, the extent and the consequences of the site’s Musk-era deterioration, and the enduring ways that jokes, memes, and ideas from the site’s golden age continue to shape the ways we write, speak, think, and are governed. Elena Saavedra Buckley, senior editor at Harper’s and contributing editor at The Drift, guided the conversation with New York columnist and Know Your Enemy cohost
, Deez Links author and former Vanity Fair senior correspondent , This Machine Kills cohost and The Tech Bubble author , and New York Times Magazine story editor Willy Staley. For those who couldn’t make it to the event, we’re glad to be able to share a transcript, lightly edited for clarity, below.
Elena Saavedra Buckley: How does Twitter feel these days? How would you compare that feeling to what you thought would happen when Musk took over? Has the site totally deteriorated, or has it regained more of a footing than we thought it would after the purchase went through?
Sam Adler-Bell: My experience of this might be a little bit different from some other people’s, because I host a podcast about the American right. For the past six years, half my timeline has been full of the right, so that I know what they’re talking about. What I feel like has happened is that now everybody, without their consent, is having my experience of Twitter.
Willy Staley: From a news perspective, there are still stories that break on there. There are things you can discover. But I do think one of the things that feels particularly broken, and I don’t see any way it could come back, is Twitter’s use as a pointing device to articles elsewhere. That was so important in the creation of the media environment we all know. Whether it was good or bad, who can say? But it was central. Musk has suppressed links from news organizations he doesn’t like, or maybe even all links. That is a profound difference — social traffic is down, although you’re still finding readers other ways.
Edward Ongweso Jr: Before this, I was trying to think of a metaphor for how I think about Twitter. Last night, I was talking in front of a subway entrance. I realize someone’s been screaming for a minute or two, and I look up and he’s yelling at me. He’s been yelling at me the whole time, and goes on yelling for a little longer, for three or four minutes, kind of cooking my shit, actually. I kind of just ignored it and went back to talking to my friend. But I think that’s pretty much my experience with Twitter. Usually, you would have to reach a certain level of virality to have to deal with right-wing freaks. Now they’re in almost every single corner I look in. And it’s not just the rabid skull measuring freaks, but it’s also the crypto guys, manosphere guys. Anyone on the kind of reactionary, capitalist, fundamentalist or tradcon spectrum pops up.
Delia Cai: I really thought that as soon as Musk took over, it would all fall apart. Everyone was going to leave. I find that I am still using it as entertainment, even though it definitely is a weirder, grosser, emptier kind, like eating a ton of Cheetos and thinking, Yeah, this is what I want. This feels good. So much of my experience on Twitter was very much of the media industry, with media-adjacent people, and so many of those people left, sensibly. In their place, we see a rerun of people figuring out old joke formats or old structures that we figured out five years ago. Random people are filling in this void in the Twitter ecosystem. It feels like, if you take out the news element of it, we’re trapped in a timeless space, because we’re just seeing the same jokes over and over again.
Saavedra Buckley: I want to look back; Ed, I wondered if you could remind us about Twitter’s founding. I sometimes forget what Twitter was before Elon. What was it meant to be when it started? You've said elsewhere that this is not the first time Twitter has been run by a megalomaniac. Who were those people and what did they want for the site?
Ongweso: The main predecessor is Jack Dorsey; he co-founds Twitter in 2006, becomes CEO in 2007, and runs it until 2008, when he’s ousted. The next year, he forms Square, which becomes Block, his payments company. He’s also increasingly obsessed with cryptocurrency — which gave us a bit of a preview of where his politics ended up going. He comes back to join Twitter in 2011 as the executive chairman, then becomes chief executive again in 2015. He is someone who, I think, was read as a hippie billionaire, who was concerned with cultivating a town square. But I think this was part of a pretty successful PR campaign. He did attempt to cultivate and focus on newsgathering and reporting, and envisioned experimenting with “citizen politics” or “citizen journalism.” But in the early years, and upon his return, he was also motivated by increasingly anarcho-capitalist views about what speech should look like, about what the community should look like, about what the culture of the site and the platform should look like.
He was interested in cultivating a surveillance apparatus or data harvesting operation that could be used by states that were interested in getting information on people who were using the platform. Looking at what Twitter is right now, my suspicion is that this is probably where it would have ended up in one way or another if Dorsey had continued as the head. If he had continued to drift further and further to the right, he may have ended up in the same place as Musk. They agree frequently on how Twitter should be run, about features that should be implemented, about policies that should be rolled out to structure the platform. I think it just would have taken a bit longer. And so I think there’s an important throughline: Twitter has pretensions to be a public sphere where everyone can come in and talk, but it has in fact been shaped by financial pressures, by ideological pressures, and internal debate. All of this has driven its development into increasingly fertile ground for right wingers and reactionaries.
Saavedra Buckley: Twitter was pitched at the beginning as a much rawer place. Willy, in your great New York Times Magazine piece, you talk about how under Dorsey the autofill status prompt was “What are you doing?” and when Evan Williams became CEO the prompt became “What’s happening?” That shift, as you argue, symbolizes an ongoing confusion about whether Twitter was fundamentally a news site or a solipsistic experience. Was it ever a breaking news site?
Staley: I remember talking to someone when I was working on that essay. He was like, “Oh, I kind of lumped it in with Dodgeball,” which was the name of an app. There were all these SMS apps at the time in the mid- to late aughts: Foursquare, Dodgeball, and then Twitter. These were ways of letting your friends know via SMS where you were at on a night out. Now, Dorsey originally wanted to call it “Status.” He thought of it as, like, an AOL away status anywhere. He wanted it to be audio, maybe, but that wouldn’t work at a nightclub. He was kind of a party guy and, I think, an aspiring model at some time — you can find his Flickr online.
Saavedra Buckley: He also wanted to call it stat.us.
Adler-Bell: I like the idea that it was for putting up lyrics that you wanted your crush to see.
Staley: I mean, it was that! There was that stuff going on in the early days. I remember when I first heard about it. This was 2008. I was working at a restaurant, and this guy Brandon was asking me if I had heard of Twitter. I said that I had, but I didn’t understand what it was. He was like, “Well, it’s kind of like a social search engine. Say, you’re in Seattle and you want to go get a bagel. You can tweet, I’m in Seattle, I want to go get a bagel. Where should I go? And your friends who know can tell you.” I was like, that sounds okay, I’ll check it out. And I signed up soon after. And that was a weird way to characterize it, but it does capture something real. Nick Bilton’s book Hatching Twitter recounts this debate between Ev Williams and Dorsey, where they were saying, “If you’re looking at a fire on Third and Market in downtown San Francisco, and posted, ‘there’s a fire,’ are you saying ‘there’s a fire’? Or are you saying, ’I’m looking at a fire’?” Dorsey felt the latter: it’s your status, you’re looking at a fire. And Ev Williams thought, no, you’re relaying the information: this is a hive mind. The way Bilton tells it, that debate got settled by the miraculous plane landing in the Hudson. That news was broken on Twitter by a guy with his phone. That’s the basic narrative of how Ev seemed to win.
Saavedra Buckley: Since we’re all journalists, we can talk a little more about how we in that industry came to the site. It was really pitched as this place where news was happening. Now, with some hindsight, we know that was maybe not entirely true — the Arab Spring was talked about as something that happened on Twitter, but now we know that when some governments turned Twitter off, more people actually went out to protest. But we joined, and it started to shape our jobs. Who joined first? Which media companies were most credulous or resistant?
Staley: I was certainly never told to use it for work. I wasn’t really there for this; I was waiting tables and freelancing around 2010 or 2011, when journalists were moving there. TinyURL helped, because Twitter’s character limit was still 140 and it allowed people to share articles on there, which brought journalists in, which brought the wider conversation in. South by Southwest 2007 was a big breakthrough moment, because people were partying and letting people know where they were at in Austin. And then by ’10, ’11, that’s when journalists start coming en masse.
Saavedra Buckley: Sam and Delia, were you ever pushed in any of your jobs to tweet more or to write things that would do well on the site?
Cai: My Twitter says I started in 2009, which is not correct, because I think I would have been sixteen, and I was not that cool of a sixteen-year-old. I think I remember, my sophomore year in Journalism School at the University of Missouri, we had a class called multimedia journalism, and part of the class was to get on Twitter. Your assignment was to tweet three times a week, and you were graded on it. I think our professors really wanted us to be tweeting news, and of course very quickly it developed into just tweeting gossip about each other, and making fake accounts for, like, the cute barista at the local Starbucks. So it was, in some ways, great training for a very small group of dorks who had a new tool. And I used it when I graduated and started working in media. I remember using it as my social map. You just went to J school, you learned about all the principles of journalism, and here is a map of everyone actually important that you should be following and reading and knowing about. My first job, I would just have Twitter open all day and find people to follow and try to keep up with.
Adler-Bell: When did I join Twitter?
Saavedra Buckley: May 2010.
Adler-Bell: I was laughing at Willy, because I thought 2008 was so long ago. But I joined just two years later. At the time I was still in college. I think I joined Twitter because I was trying to help get a friend elected to Congress in Rhode Island. We were terrible. I mean, we did so badly; my friend did not win the Democratic primary. But somebody who worked on the campaign was like, “You should start Twitter so you can tweet out where David is, and our press releases or something.” Then my first journalism job was interning at The Nation magazine, and they must have told us to use it. I did start using it more. And then I ended up staying at The Nation and doing the social media for the magazine for a period of time. I was the assistant to the person who was the head of that, but if she was out sick, then I was just doing all of The Nation’s Twitter stuff. That was really instructive, because it was like being plugged into the media ecosystem, and you could really get a sense of what kinds of things worked in that algorithmic environment.
We should gossip. I remember at the time, Ben Dreyfuss was the social media manager for Mother Jones. If you follow Ben Dreyfuss now, that seems fucking insane, because he just does reactionary, stupid, rich guy opinions on Twitter now. But back then I hated him because all this strategic social media stuff came off as just a little bit too thirsty. Whereas I was like, we’re The Nation! We can’t indulge in that kind of low behavior, we’re a two-hundred-year-old magazine! But I wanted to, and I was very angry with Ben because he could. That was the beginning for me.
Saavedra Buckley: Many of the earliest media people who got onto Twitter were bloggers; they brought a kind of vim to the site which helped them attract followings. And now I feel like we’re back to blogs a little bit — some of the old Twitter feeling is now maybe reproduced on comment sections and Substacks. Delia, I wanted to go to you as someone with a Substack. You’re publishing pieces that have kind of a blog tone, especially your “Hate Read” series. Do you feel like a Twitter mindset has now come to Substack? How does Twitter bridge these two eras of blogging?
Cai: Someone was saying that the best way to start building a following on Substack is to start writing about Substack. I found that very funny, because on Twitter the central joke was always about being on Twitter and Twitter culture. I don’t know if you guys are active on Substack Notes, or if it’s still pretty niche, but I think that’s the closest place I’ve found that feels like how I remember Twitter, because it feels so small, and everyone wants to consume writerly stuff. There’s a smugness that I think really powers the posting.
Saavedra Buckley: I do want to talk about jokes and how Twitter speech patterns developed. Twitter comedy was very influenced by the different eras of the site. You know, 140 characters produces different types of jokes from 280. And quote tweeting also spawned its own joke formats. Does anyone want to take a crack at talking about what conditions made “Weird Twitter” possible — @dril and comedy accounts like that? Was that just what would have happened on a forum and Twitter happened to be the biggest one, or was there something specific about the way Twitter moved?
Staley: I talked to Mike Caulfield, then a researcher at University of Washington. He asked me if I knew about the Scott Baio diaper thing, which I think I sort of did, but he refreshed me. And then I talked to Stefan Heck, the guy responsible for it. This is Weird Twitter. I think they spilled out of one forum, right?
Saavedra Buckley: Yeah, “Something Awful.”
Staley: It was a bunch of funny guys from one forum. They all ended up on Twitter, and they were experimenting with different ways of posting on there. As Stefan described, they went to a hashtag called #TCOT, which stood for “Top Conservatives of Twitter,” a big Tea Party-era thing. And you could go in there and just find Tea Party guys and mess with them. They eventually found out that Scott Baio, the actor, was really active there. They had a running joke about diaper fetishes, and they bothered him enough asking him if he had a diaper fetish that he flipped out and posted something like “I don’t have a diaper fetish.” Then they got it trending that he had died just by posting enough, because it’s a frequency thing, the way the algorithm works. Someone altered Wikipedia so it said that he died of a diaper related issue. NBC ran an article about it debunking it online. It was an incredible gag. And it goes to show the frailty of the map that Twitter planned to provide at the time; it was highly, highly gameable, and remains so — even more so.
Saavedra Buckley: Twitter comedy — dunking on people, someone becoming the main character of the day — is that something that is just a result of social media writ large, or were those Twitter logics of communication that have been reproduced? Delia, I want to bring up Hate Read again.
Cai: Hate Read is a pop-up newsletter series that I’m running on my newsletter, Deez Links. I can’t believe I’m saying all those words at NYU. It’s the second year that I’ve been doing it. For a month there’s a blog every day, and it’s a pseudonymous person just ranting in a very specific way about something that they hate. The idea is that they go for either stuff everyone likes, or stuff you haven’t thought about. Last year, when I started, I sort of wanted it to be an experiment on whether Twitter still worked for stuff like this. Can you still invent stuff for people to get mad at when there’s so much normal stuff to get mad at? I really wanted to harness the animating force of Twitter, by being very specific — very passionate, but also very specific. Let’s say your flight was canceled, so you decide that you want to tweet the minutia of your flight delay to your three hundred followers and maybe someone at Delta will see you. And sometimes they would. There was this feeling that everything is kind of worth complaining about.
The first year, I asked twenty or thirty friends to pick a topic and write anonymous posts, and I wanted to see whether people would engage if they didn’t know who it was. There was a bit of paranoia, but people also felt safer. I think we wound up accidentally picking topics that really tapped into nerves of Twitter, like menswear. There’s one about hating media parties — and that was a perfect litmus test, because you could read it and think, I agree, media parties suck. Or you could read it and think, well, this person clearly hasn’t been to the right parties. When I worked at BuzzFeed, we talked a lot about what job a piece of content does. The most effective content gave people a reason to talk about themselves. You give them a quiz, and they can say, this shows that I’m a cat person. I think Hate Read embodied that philosophy of the internet, where you give people something that allows them to signal about their own tastes or beliefs and you’ve struck gold. This year we’re doing it again, but it’s really funny because it has not made any sort of ripple on Twitter at all.
Saavedra Buckley: A lot of Twitter humor originated within communities like Black Twitter and gay Twitter. Now, on platforms like Bluesky, people are trying to deliberately build distinct communities that used to self-organize on Twitter. Ed, can you tell us what open-source protocols are, and how those places are built?
Ongweso: The quick and dirty way of saying it is that they’re trying to decentralize community creation. Part of the philosophy is that if you give people a little bit more control over actually crafting the community, then they may be more invested in maintaining it. So you don’t need to invest as much in the things that were features at Twitter before Dorsey made Bluesky as a kind of offshoot in 2019: safety teams, content moderation. That’s not to say that creating open source protocols is a cynical plan, but it’s an experiment to ask how we can make sure that people who are involved in this online community can actually maintain and preserve it. Bluesky is one of many attempts to create decentralized alternatives to Twitter, where the hope is that maybe there’s a bit more vigilant moderation, there are more agreed upon norms about how we’re going to talk to each other, what we’re going to talk about, and how language is used. Twitter has seen waves and waves of exoduses over the years, and also debates and pressure over modifying how it moderates and implements its trust and safety policy. But there’s little that can be done outside of the internal debates that the company has, because it’s centrally run and managed.
Saavedra Buckley: The person who really intensified moderation discussions at Twitter was Trump. These were obviously discussions that Twitter was already having — Dorsey found himself caught between being asked to moderate more and being told from the right that he was censoring people. But Trump turned this into a much bigger discussion. Sam, could you talk a little bit about how Trump came on to the site, and what it was like to watch the first administration on Twitter?
Adler-Bell: Well, I wrote down one quip I want you all to hear, so you get your ticket’s worth. It’s a highbrow metaphor for you, because you’re all smart, sophisticated journalists. Hegel said that Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback. I’m tempted to say that Trump was, for a time, the world spirit in 140 characters.
Staley: Can I jump in really quickly? Because there’s one thing that I think doesn’t get said about Trump enough — but if you were on the website long enough, you might have this feeling too. In 2012, when he was starting to make a name for himself in politics through birtherism, he was also on Twitter as a bit of a washed up celebrity, kind of like Jose Canseco. I had them lumped in the same category. I was like, follow Jose Canseco. Funny. And then there’s Donald Trump, too
Adler Bell: This is definitely what I want to talk about, because what I mean by him being the world spirit in 140 characters is that he was so good at Twitter in every phase of its existence. He intuited what the platform could be for and what it could be for him. There are so many idioms that we use, probably in a daily conversation if you’re a Twitter user, but also in tweets all the time, that come from Trump tweets. “Many such cases.” “Sad.” “The losers and haters.” “Many people are saying.”
“Looked disgusting--nipples protruding--in his blue shirt before Congress. Very, very disrespectful.” “The Coca Cola company is not happy with me--that’s okay, I’ll keep drinking that garbage.” This is important to keep in mind. He was a celebrity gossip — a washed-up celebrity gossip — when that was what a lot of people were going to the site for. He was live tweeting the award ceremonies when that was one of the main things people were on Twitter to do. And then he was really good at Twitter, obviously, when it was an alt-right platform for grievance and agita, and that’s what politics became.
Cai: Do you know who introduced him to Twitter?
Adler-Bell: I don’t have any facts. I just had that Hegel thing. There are two common modes on Twitter. One is self-aggrandizing, and one is self-effacing. Trump actually used to do both. He used to be pretty ironic about himself and about his figure and his brand. He doesn’t do that so much anymore, but he was good at that in the beginning. And the question I was thinking about before this is, why is he so good at it? I do have one theory. It’s a truism that we probably have all heard that social media forced us — especially journalists, but pretty much everybody in some way — to become brand ambassadors for ourselves. My thesis about Trump is that he has always been in the business of the brand of Trump and nothing else.
In the 1990s, he stopped being a particularly successful builder and developer; basically all of his creditors hauled him into a room and said “you can’t do this anymore, and we’re gonna bail you out.” They bailed him out because the brand was still good, and he could sell the brand and put it on steaks and buildings and casinos without actually being a proper real estate developer anymore. His sense of himself, I think, has been coterminous with his brand since way before Twitter existed. When we were all trying to learn how to curate ourselves on Twitter, we found there was some kind of gap between who we really were and how we presented ourselves to our audience, and that created some tension. I don’t think Trump has that at all. I think the brand of Trump is how he experiences himself. And so in some fundamental sense, he’s the perfect Twitter user, because there’s no distance in his mind between his brand, who he is to other people, and his sense of self. It’s just the same guy to him.
Ongweso: Do you think there have been any good imitators, not just of how he speaks, but in how he uses the platform? In response to him, have there been attempts to experiment with new forms that might do the same thing?
Adler-Bell: There are other people that we think of as excellent Twitter users, like @dril, but they’re the best if we don’t know who they are, because once you know who they are, then you’re thinking about the gap between who they are and how they present themselves. Whereas with Trump, it’s just: there’s Trump. The brand Trump, the name Trump, the man Trump — it’s all the same thing. I do think that one of the reasons why Trump was so confounding to the journalist class when he was running for office is that journalists imagine themselves to be savvy understanders of the difference between how politicians present themselves and who they actually are. There’s a frontstage and a backstage, and being able to show people behind the curtain is the value they add to political culture. I think all that tension and confusion about taking him literally or taking him seriously was in part because there was no frontstage or backstage with Trump. He had secrets, and it was good that we discovered those. But there was no real distinction between Trump the candidate, Trump the celebrity, Trump the man.
Staley: I would also add that when you read accounts of his rallies, he’d always wait and see the lights turn on, and he would respond to the applause, and he would pocket it and would do it again and again. That exact feedback mechanism is what Twitter provides: with robust data, and even quicker. He’s a guy who’s very provisional, really, listening in to an unlistened-to part of the electorate and finding out what sort of strange platform you could cobble together that might appeal intuitively. Twitter, and the way he ran his rallies, provided this constant feedback.
Saavedra Buckley: When it comes to his relationship to the media, it feels like Twitter pushed individual journalists and companies to establish platforms and personas on the site, which only makes it easier for someone as good at the site as Trump to think of them as people he can dunk on himself. Musk is another person who responds to that new order; his Twitter addiction, which led him to eventually purchase the site, was really fueled by being upset at the way that people were covering him, and tweeting at them. So the need for media organizations to be on the site puts them in front of these people who now have the power to target them.
Adler-Bell: I’ve always felt like Musk doesn’t have the juice. He is not good at Twitter; he had to buy it in order to be the top dog. Trump is, in this way, “self-made.” There was a time during the 2016 election when we thought it was plausible that Trump riling up the alt-right (now called the “new right” or the “dissident right”), and them engaging with him and making memes about him, was going to be an albatross for him. Hillary gave the “basket of deplorables” speech because she thought it was a winning message that he was associated with these awful people, these awful accounts. And I think unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that, at least for the right, they create their energy on Twitter. It’s not just attention. Obviously, Trump is a genius of attention, of keeping our attention. But also, even if it’s ugly, there’s some kind of production of energy on the right on Twitter that persists to this day and that is conducive to their political aims.
Now we really have an administration full of anonymous conservative right-wing Twitter accounts. What happens on Twitter, in a very real sense, has a huge influence on public policymaking in this White House. Take Laura Loomer, who to me just used to be one of these crazy Twitter people. She handcuffed herself outside of Twitter’s offices after she was banned. She went into the White House last week, or the week before, and told Trump which national security advisors to fire, which he was unwilling to do up until that moment. I think about an alternative history sometimes where Bernie wins, and dirtbag left, Weird Twitter people like Felix Biederman are in the State Department, and all the Democratic candidates have to go on Chapo. There are all kinds of reasons why that wouldn’t happen, but if you’re on the left, to understand what it’s like on the right, picture that.
Ongweso: Like you were saying, Musk doesn’t have the juice. But I also think it doesn’t matter if he has the juice, because he gets to be the vanguard for making the juice, the secret juice. He gets to push through policy changes, tweak the algorithm so that now it’s weighting certain types of content, amplifying certain voices, and helping do a lot of structure-building, networking, and infrastructure support that is also important for the right on Twitter. They’re trying to figure out not only how to emulate one another’s style to communicate with each other, but also how to make it so that this ecosystem actually has an impact on your personal ideology, so that it polarizes you. I think Musk’s real success is both doing that and also making a home for the group of reactionaries who are interested in doing that, but maybe didn’t have the commitment of someone like Musk. They’re getting the chance to experiment with networks, pushing out lab grown fascists over and over and over again, and building communities around them.
Saavedra Buckley: Willy, do you want to talk about Chris Bail’s research?
Staley: Chris Bail is a researcher at Duke sociology, and he has this book called Breaking the Social Media Prism that I found really interesting. There’s a kind of fixation in the media class on disinformation, misinformation, the filter bubble, and all these things in the algorithm. Few people were asking “What the hell are all these people doing posting? Who are these people, and why do they do it? What do they get out of it?” The social media prism is Bail’s idea about what social media does to us. He starts with this sociological concept of the looking-glass self, which is that you experiment with selves and identities, and you take fine grained social feedback, and adjust, find out how you fit in, how you can self-present and so on. And in the social media prism, this is all distorted; you get extremely quick data feedback from a weird, self-selected group of people.
Then Bail did this research on the filter bubble, which is the idea that people aren’t being exposed to ideas from outside of their camp. He had people follow a bot that retweets, at a regular cadence, ideas from the other side. So he would get conservatives to follow this bot that retweets Nancy Pelosi, and then see how they felt at the end of a week. What he found is that they got more pissed off about the other side. It didn’t burst their filter bubble. It had a bigger effect on conservatives: they moved further right after being exposed to Nancy Pelosi’s and Bernie Sanders’s tweets. In fact, three of his subjects found each other by attacking the bot and became friends. Bail talks about how this sorting generates a centrifuge that spins out anyone who would want to occupy any sort of middle ground, and makes a lot of people who are kind of lonely and sad political extremists appear as normal.
Saavedra Buckley: We’ve already been talking about how this affects people on the right, but Twitter has also been invoked to critique insularity on the left. “Bernie Bros” is one phrase that comes to mind. And then there are the technocratic, pro-growth, abundance people, who have been talked about as Twitter phenoms that are now maybe writing one version of the Democrats’ future. How can we think about insularity in different corners?
Staley: One way I think about what Musk has done — cranking all the levers right on the website — is that if in the peak Twitter era, there were insularity problems and delusions on the left, those same exact forces have taken hold on the political right. That seems to be a clear byproduct of platform forces, and the centrifugal forces of discourse that it creates. It seems to happen to one side or the other.
Saavedra Buckley: Have any of you had your mind changed by Twitter?
Adler-Bell: Absolutely not. I’ve changed many minds, though.
I was thinking about how we talk about politics on Twitter. It’s so tough. There are two affected types of tweets you see a lot of. One is the very blasé, ironic, funny tweet, and one is the extremely sincere, morally beseeching tweet. And some people are really good at only doing one or the other. Like Willy, I feel like you’re good at just being blasé and ironic all the time, so you never have to be embarrassed about moving from one register to the other. Whereas I do both, and it’s so embarrassing. Say you get genuinely so upset about something that you see on Twitter. You do a really sincere thread. I still do this sometimes. And then the next time I go on Twitter, I’m like, Oh, I’ve got a funny joke about a hamburger. And my last tweets were really serious. I was this character who cares so deeply about this one thing, which is definitely more important than the hamburger joke, but I’m switching back to that other character. People don’t care, because the tweets go away, but it is something that’s interesting. If we were to look at any of your Twitter feeds and see the toggling back and forth between your morally serious tweets and your ironic ones, you would seem totally insane.
Staley: I’ve sat and looked at it and thought about saying something serious, but the crossroads are so many years behind me.
Cai: I think it feels like at this point, you’ve already lost if you are caring or being earnest online. We all know it’s silly to be here in the first place, so if I’m sitting here stewing, then I’ve already lost. I definitely have seen my own urge to be earnest in any way online plummet. I already know I shouldn’t even be here, so the only way forward is to have this affect of “who cares.” Because then you can’t really be nailed down.
Ongweso: This is interesting, because I feel like I don’t feel that guilt about shifting between registers. But I definitely find myself limiting how much of my own life I share. I think also, as you use Twitter more and more, you get the sense that all these posts do stay up, but they’re also ephemeral. Usually I’m not on my profile itself, unless I’m trying to find a specific tweet. I don’t think of it as like, my last tweet was serious, or my last one was sincere. I do think: did I tweet something revealing so that, now that I have 10,000 skull measurers in my mentions, they can figure something out about my personal life?
You know, we’re talking about how Twitter is degraded, but I think it is still entertaining and fun on a fundamental level. Even in those moments when there’s a chorus of right wing nuts and racists, it’s still kind of fun to fight with them a little bit, to play in the mud with the pigs. But it’s also fun to just watch people do that. It also feels good, in a different way, when I’m trying to say something serious, and it resonates with people. I think that even the platform going to shit hasn’t encroached on that fundamental feeling. Even if the social bonds are atrophying, even if the community feels like it’s not there as much, even if there’s a retreat into Twitter groups and communities, or to the group chats and DMs, it still on a fundamental level feels the same.
Saavedra Buckley: I’ll finish by going back to Bluesky. Kyle Chayka wrote a good feature about its founder in The New Yorker the other week, and he makes the observation that a lot of Bluesky posts are like, “No one’s talking about this horrible thing.” But they are talking about it, and everyone who follows them is liking it. When I go on there, there’s a seriousness that sits alongside, like, Milky Way photographs. Do you guys think that a healthier open source place could ever attract as many people as Twitter? Or is there something addicting and satisfying about the mud that you’re in on Twitter that can’t really be replicated elsewhere, and that maybe feels real in some painful but necessary way?
Ongweso: I do not use Bluesky except to share links that get suppressed elsewhere. That’s really it. It would be nice to get away from the Nazis and the crypto scams, but I also still find that I have a much better experience on Twitter. And so I think that’s part of the larger question. Do we want a more humane, kinder experience? Maybe not. Maybe the mess is part of the fun. Social media is probably something that, in a few decades, we will look back at and say, “Why the fuck did we do that?” They’re just advertising platforms that are pretending to be ways for us to socialize with one another. It’s like the flattest possible version of interacting with other human beings, and then there’s the fact that it’s run by a forgotten son of apartheid who wants to imprint on as much of the country’s psyche as he can. So I think that even if there were different hands at the steering wheel, social media in and of itself is a questionable product, a corrosive influence on people’s minds. But it is fun.
would love to know if this talk is available to watch online!
Thank you for this discussion. Clearly, Musk is a Trump Wannabe, but without any of the "wisdom" or "savvy" of Trump (thank god). I miss Twitter. X is a brand name that conveys evil, "X marks the spot" used to be a term related to "treasures." Now, not so much.
https://adhdexplainer.substack.com/p/a-little-meme-posted-again-for-fun