Teetering on the Edge: The Potential Downfall of Twitter
Elon Musk’s Twitter Purchase: What Went Wrong?
After the purchase of Twitter, a text-based social media platform, from the famous billionaire Elon Musk, this controversial yet popular platform experienced a substantial amount of backlash in the past year.
As soon as the platform got a new CEO, many changes were introduced most of which were not well received in the public and many speculate that they may lead to the platform’s downfall. In this article, we aim to understand what went wrong, whether the changes were genuinely detrimental, what may be a potential future of this platform and is it actually over for Twitter?
Consequences and challenges
After the initial announcement of the purchase, many people were skeptical about the decision. Even Elon Musk himself initially backed off, complaining about the majority of bots on the platform and stating that at the moment of purchase, Twitter was still losing a lot of money.
Nevertheless, Twitter was purchased, and just after that, Musk implemented new policies and actions, such as firing a lot of staff and changing the conditions for obtaining official blue check marks.
With that the downfall began. Under new management Twitter immediately started to experience a lot of challenges, caused by new policies or other controversies. Here are some examples:
Checkmark policy change
For example, the already mentioned check mark policy had led to a lot of confusion. Previously, blue check marks verified the identity of a user, but after a new implementation any subscriber of “Twitter Blue” may have had one. At least this problem was not applied to business, political or military accounts, as they obtained their own gold and gray check marks.
Though, even that implementation was not without flaws, as Twitter in some cases mistakenly gave checkmarks to unofficial accounts.
Overall necessity to pay to have your account verified has led a lot of people to leave the platform, because for many users verification is perceived as granted and should not be charged for.
Limited number of posts
At the beginning of July, Twitter implemented a “view limit” on the number of posts and replies users can see per day.
The official reason given by Elon Musk was to address concerns over data scraping. While this new policy does help with that problem, it makes it hard for non-verified users to use the platform since they can only see 1000 posts a day (500 if they are new to the platform). Verified users get 10000 posts, which is a reasonable number, but it still means that regular use of Twitter now requires you to subscribe to “Twitter Blue”.
It is needless to say that this change was greeted exceptionally negatively. Besides that this feature makes Twitter basically inconvenient to use, it also might lead to much worse consequences.
For example, some users have expressed practical concerns about how the daily limits may impact their ability to monitor severe weather on the platform. This frequently involves going through a large number of updates, alerts, and warnings and this limitation might potentially put users in danger.
Content moderation
With the change of content moderation methods, came a lot of concerns. Users noticed there is now more hate speech on the platform. Also a lot of controversial accounts were unbanned.
Clearly, people want to improve moderation and to ban yet again a lot of unbanned users because of their potentially harmful message. To this day, these requirements are not fully satisfied, and that is why more and more users boycott the platform.
Musical Lawsuit
A lawsuit has been filed by a group of 17 music publishers against Twitter for copyright infringement on approximately 1,700 songs. The plaintiffs allege that Twitter allowed users to post music to the platform without permission, which is a violation of copyright law. The publishers are seeking up to $250 million in damages.
“Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service,” as stated David Israelite, the president of the National Music Publishers’ Association.
Ad Revenue Drop
As a result of many mentioned controversies, Twitter’s ad revenue in the US dropped by 59% compared to the previous year, reaching $88 million for the period of April 1 to the first week of May.
According to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times, the company has regularly failed to meet its sales projections in the US, sometimes by 30%.
Most advertisers choose to pause or withdraw ads from Twitter as a result of Elon Musk’s unpredictable behavior, platform instability, and controversies surrounding the deal.
Threads threats
In addition to the problems already listed, the recently launched Threads social network from Meta has also become a huge threat to Twitter.
Considering Twitter’s position, Threads has gained a particularly strong popularity and the demand for it is as high as it can get. Moreover, it is hard to ignore the fact that this platform became the most rapidly downloaded app ever, with 30 million downloads within the first 16 hours of its launch.
To make the situation even more dire, Threads is also connected to other Meta products, like Instagram with 2 billion existing users, who can now easily join this new platform.
Overall, with a competitor of this caliber, Twitter is now at a substantial risk of losing a significant portion of its users and advertisers.
X-Branding
Besides all of the problems, mentioned above, Twitter continues to move further and further away from its original concept, becoming something entirely new, with the recent complete rebranding of the platform, changing its name from “Twitter” to “X” and implementing a new logotype. Musk explained this decision as one of the steps to changing this platform into an “everything app”, as it would no longer be associated with just typing short text posts..
As the changes mentioned above, the complete rebranding was also not received really well, confusing regular users and advertisers.
Twitter has died. What’s next?
With these problems in mind, it is safe to assume that Twitter might actually collapse in the future. But what are the consequences of this event? Will it result in just the replacement of the platform or there is actually something more to it?
Research value
Nowadays Twitter’s biggest value for researchers and organizations can be perceived as a global archive of collective human behavior. Besides, it provides a credentialing and fact-checking service. With it researchers can analyze digital traces of human activity to study a variety of phenomena.
For example, Twitter sentiment data can be used to evaluate people’s attitudes towards policies and services that address climate change, offering policymakers an additional method to take more effective action. This is an alternative to traditional subjective well-being surveys.
So the fact that Twitter can close down can potentially mean that researchers would not be able to gather a lot of potentially useful data, at least through such a big and centralized database as Twitter.
Advertising platform
In addition, Twitter serves as a significant advertising channel for companies, celebrities or even specific products. And with it being shut down, all of these things, not just in the US but also in other countries, will lose a vast advertising and customer research platform.
Average user stays connected
Regarding a regular user experience, the risk of Twitter shutting down does not severely damage it, because they can just move on to other platforms, such as already mentioned Threads. The potential inconveniences of that decision may only be a process of moving your audience or friends to this different platform, or to use it in order to find specific information or discussion, as Twitter is more likely to have it, because it has a giant database, with years of communications.
What Twitter should do to stop this?
With the current indications, Twitter will continue to experience losses in revenue and in popularity, at least in a recent future. All of the combined factors mentioned above will definitely give Twitter a hard time and at the end it will come down to the fact if Twitter will be able to survive this period of recession.
And in order for Twitter to get back up, it needs to implement some serious changes and fast. But what exactly can it do?
Moderation processes
Firstly, Elon Musk’s stance on content moderation has negatively impacted advertiser interest in Twitter. As a company heavily dependent on brand advertisers, Twitter must address this issue by improving its moderation to ensure that advertisers are not afraid to publish their ads near potentially harmful content.
To regain the trust of advertisers, Twitter has also already introduced several initiatives, such as offering free ads, lifting the ban on political advertising, and giving companies greater control over the placement of their ads.
Make other revenue sources more attractive
Another possible solution is to diversify their revenue streams. While Twitter now is highly focused on its “Twitter Blue” subscription as one of a primary sources of revenue, the recently introduced changes just included previously free services, such as two-factor verification or viewing an almost unlimited number of posts. This approach however still harms the company reputationally, as it takes away capabilities from ordinary users.
However, there is little evidence to suggest that charging users in a social networking-based business is a viable strategy unless Twitter can significantly improve the benefits offered to Twitter Blue users and provide them with something new instead of moving free features into the subscription.
What about competition?
Regarding the establishment of new competitors, such as Threads, Twitter still has advantages like a big user base, long established community, advanced database and recognisability, yet all of these advantages might be reduced over time with Threads’ growth. And the only way for Twitter to not be overwhelmed by competitors is to resolve its current problems and grow into something even better.
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In conclusion, Twitter has faced numerous challenges since being purchased by Elon Musk. The changes implemented by the new CEO have been met with significant backlash, leading to a decline in ad revenue and popularity. And with the recent launch of the Threads social network from Meta, Twitter’s user base and advertising revenue will definitely decline.
In order to survive, Twitter needs to implement significant changes, such as improving content moderation and diversifying its revenue streams. And Twitter tries to do all of this, but it is also exceptionally important to take into account the needs and desires of consumers to ensure that more similar mistakes are not made in the future. And with that conclusion we are left only with one question: Would Twitter actually follow such advice?
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