Still standing, still staying
XTwitter’s more important than whoever owns it, Elon Musk or anyone, now or any other time
Elon Musk has made the most of tapping into the wisdom of engineers. The wisdom of crowds … is another matter entirely … We the Twitterverse, are both the product he sells to advertisers and the object of desire for those same advertisers. For that reason, he needs us more than we need him. That may be why, a year from now … to our surprise, we may look back and see how little Elon Musk changed Twitter, and how much Twitter changed Elon Musk.
X suddenly went down on Dec. 21. Users globally had problems accessing the social-media platform for more than an hour. The cause wasn’t immediately known. None of this was helpful to Elon Musk, X’s owner. All of it made for an unintentionally accurate, uncannily immediate metaphor for a social media platform that’s been going dark by degrees since October 2022.
Clearly, a lot happens fast. In little more than a year, we’ve been witnesses to the law of unintended consequences geometrically applied, courtesy of Musk, the multi-billionaire buccaneer and china-shop bull who, in an interview and an instant, may have finally jumped the last of multiple sharks in his shambolic control of Twitter, the platform currently incorporated as X, 14 months after taking charge as the Chief Twit, at a cost of $44 billion.
It was just six months ago, in June, when Musk dragged perhaps $20 billion in brand equity into the smoldering dumpster fire that was and is the world’s most reflexively populous social-media network by changing its name from Twitter to the letter X, a move for which we’re all still transitioning, still solving for why. The move, anonymizing and distancing, aroused deep passions in the community, and not a little confusion. We still don’t know what to call our messages — X-marks? X-its? X-cretions?
Since then, to borrow a phrase, it’s been one damn thing after another. On July 1, Musk announced a temporary limit on the number of tweets verified and unverified users can read per day, as his way to address what Musk called “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” He rescinded the “block” feature. Musk got rid of the advisory council he had suggested, but never really committed himself to. He blamed “vast armies of bots” as the reason for moving toward a subscription-based content model, a rationale questioned, and even debunked. He fired thousands of engineers, content-moderation workers, and others who helped make and keep Twitter operational.
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This plus other signs of willful dysfunction and raw exercise of power prompted advertisers to start heading for the, um, X-its. A slow bleed of major advertisers continued through the summer and into the fall. Then, in the wake of the Hamas-led and -directed assault on Israel on Oct. 7, Musk made casual statements that came to be too incendiary for other advertisers to ignore. On Nov. 26, he conversed with a user of the platform, someone who referenced the odious, much-maligned “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people. In his reply, with a sage high-handedness, Musk said the user was speaking “the actual truth.”
As expected, advertisers (those who hadn’t already left the building) bailed en masse. Users continued their exodus. According to SimilarWeb, the platform lost about 15 percent of monthly active users globally and almost 18 percent of monthly users in the United States, in the first year of Musk’s control.
Something combustible was coming. It arrived on Nov. 29 at the New York Times DealBook Summit. In an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The Times, a clearly agitated Musk hissed apostate advertisers roundly. “Don’t advertise,” he said. “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience,” he added, in reference to Robert Iger, the CEO of Walt Disney, which had previously yanked ads from the X platform, and who had spoken previously at the event. “That’s how I feel. … what this advertising boycott is gonna do, is kill the company,” Musk said, without a trace of irony.
It’s a rare thing to be an eyewitness to the jaw-dropping moment the director of a once-great company incinerates the last of its goodwill in real time, over a live mic. “Go. Fuck. Yourself,” Musk said, to the people and companies and agencies that are the lifeblood of the already most financially precarious company in his portfolio. Lou Paskalis, the founder and C.E.O. of AJL Advisory, a marketing consultancy, said it plainly to The Times: “There is no advertising value that would offset the reputational risk of going back on the platform.”
Now, nearly a month after the Nov. 29 meltdown, Musk faces parallel hemorrhages he can’t afford: one of the people using the platform; the other of the advertisers who covet the eyeballs of the people using the platform. The company can’t survive for long without both of them.
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Over the past year, multitudes have decamped for any number of Twitter alternatives thought to be more accommodating of the perspectives Musk confronts. Threads (from Meta, and a functional, credible offshoot of Facebook) launched in July, and has gotten early favorable reactions. And there are Discord, Post, Mastodon, and Tribel, among others.
Whatever their alternate destination, for some bitter exiles from the Twitterverse, there’s a cognitive-dissonant comfort in walking away from XTwitter believing that it had already walked away from them. And true: We get attached to the platforms that work, and we’re not always good with change, especially change made for no apparent reason (remember the hue and cry when they just changed the font?).
But that concedes too much to the temporal circumstance of who runs the company, and how we’re generally primed to react unfavorably when the new boss tinkers at or near the margins of what we love. For all of Musk’s showboat theatrics, the platform once formally known as Twitter remains, same as it ever was, more or less.
The platform’s foundational business idea — be the connective tissue between communities, the synapses bridging conversations; enable talk among people everywhere with a quick-twitch format of a few hundred characters — hasn’t really changed at the core. Musk has complicated the experience, manipulated the process of tabulation, throttled the diversity of its user base, and outraged that user base for no discernible good reason. But a tweet is still a tweet is still a tweet.
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That long-term stability, in spite of everything, means that now may be the best time in quite a while to either stay with or return to XTwitter — certainly since October 2022. With advertisers jumping off in droves, the platform may be (however fitfully) returning to an earlier version of itself, a more benign iteration, some pre-Musk form of the platform, one in which advertiser money, personal grievance, and naked political agenda aren’t quite the irrepressible internal forces that they appear to be today.
And anyway, life among the XTwitter alternatives may not be as rosy as advertised. Bluesky, the platform created by Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey, has come under fire for failing to consistently address the prospect of hate speech and its deployment against minorities. TechCrunch reported on June 8 that “a moderation policy change that followed a death threat against a Black user has many on Bluesky questioning if the platform is safe for marginalized communities after all.”
More from TechCrunch: “Users once praised the platform for refusing to harbor hate speech — a decision that seems hollow to many Black Bluesky users after the most recent moderation policy change. Bluesky set itself apart from Twitter not only for its customizable features, but also for what appeared to be a serious interest in protecting marginalized groups. The recent policy changes, however, leave many doubtful that Bluesky can maintain that safety.”
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I’ve been approved for Bluesky, and I’m curious to see how Jack Dorsey weaves what he learned co-creating Twitter into this latest venture. And I’m looking at or joining other platforms, as much out of pluralistic curiosity as anything else. I’m down with Threads, whose enrollment process couldn’t be easier (you can sign on through Instagram). I’ve taken baby steps with Post, and I’m still making sense of Mastodon before I take that leap.
But I’m also still with Big Blue. Why? Among other reasons, I’d no more leave XTwitter because of Elon Musk than I joined Twitter because of Jack Dorsey. And maybe that’s the central, underexplored point that eludes Musk, and the rest of us: understanding that this most viral of social-media platforms has never been about the people who built it. Abandoning XTwitter because of who runs it is a default concession to the hegemony Musk represents, the self-erasure of the single voice, the power of the one over the many — the X-act opposite of what social media is supposed to be about.
To believe that the owner, or even the creator, of a social-media force is more powerful than the medium itself, more persuasive than the unruly voices that make that platform viable, is to ignore and abandon the value, the centrality of those voices to the platform’s evolution — our role in what makes social media social.
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So, at the risk of being The Last Holdout — the final hard-bitten journo clutching the struts of the last chopper off the embassy roof before the hordes roar up in jeeps and tanks downstairs — I’m still there riding the great blood-speckled bird by another name. I’ll be there, a cellist in some doomed orchestra, playing something to calm the nerves while the sumbitch goes under by the bow.
I may be there until they turn off the lights in the building for good, or until Elon Musk turns over the keys to someone else. Given the current flood of departing advertisers, that may be sooner than we think. The very fact of that hope may be a reason to continue.
I’m staying whether it is or not. And it’s not because of misguided romantic fatalism or some schadenfreude crap, but because of a bedrock conviction that XTwitter’s fundamentally bigger and more important than whoever owns it, Elon Musk or anyone else, now or ever. For me, walking away from XTwitter would be a surrender to powers that don’t deserve a victory over the everyday people, passions and perspectives that made the platform worth buying, or worth building, in the first place.
I’m staying because I know: Just like there was life in the platform before Elon Musk arrived, there’ll be life in the young old bird yet — not the benign, carefree life of a bluebird, but the hard-fought, hard-won life of a phoenix.
