The platform formerly known as Twitter used to be useful, entertaining, surprising, even joyful. A couple of years ago it was still the best newswire in the world. For a decade before that it had been by far the best way to keep up to date on any breaking news events through the eyes of the smartest, best placed, most knowledgeable people.
But last weekend, when news started trickling out about the Hamas attack on Israel, it was glaringly clear how degraded the platform had become. Until recently the automatic response would have been to look at Twitter. It would have been easy to distinguish trustworthy sources from spoofers, propagandists and bots and to zero in on verified professional journalists. If you needed a more comprehensive overview, you could have used the more powerful TweetDeck, with its multiple feeds, geolocation and content filters. Whether it was an election, a terrorist attack or a big weather event, Twitter beat all other media resources hands down.
Not any more. On Saturday morning X was a putrid mess of fake footage, ideological screeds, lies and deflections. The platform is no longer useful.
Nor is it entertaining. The jokes have turned sour, as has the tone. And it’s rarely surprising the way it used to be, when someone might recommend a fine piece of writing on a subject you were only dimly aware of. As well as being a news source, Twitter in its heyday was a great recommendation engine for ideas, opening up the riches of the internet for anyone who was interested.
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Twitter was in decline long before Elon Musk took over. The quality of discourse and openness to other views had been curdling for years into bile and braggadocio as it became a culture-war frontline, clogged with trolls, bots and spam. But it could still be fun, informative and interesting. It didn’t quite seem time to give it up yet.
Enter Musk, who celebrates the first anniversary of his takeover later this month. The world’s richest man (on some days) has done an impressive job of accelerating the collapse of what he wants us now to call X. He dispensed with the “blue checkmark” system that verified that public figures, companies and media workers were who they said they were. Its blue ticks were imperfectly applied, but they did actually mean something. The new ones, given to anyone who chooses to pay X’s new monthly charge, are worse than meaningless. Previously, blue ticks would allow you to find the Reuters correspondent on the ground in Sderot. Now they can surface the musings of white nationalists in Illinois.
Last week X removed headlines from posts linking to news articles, further reducing the visibility of journalism on the site. The change was supposedly made for aesthetic reasons, but the real motive is pretty clear. Musk doesn’t like the idea of X as a recommendation engine that links users to other websites, especially media ones. He wants you to stay on his own horrible site.
“Our algorithm tries to optimise time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” he posted recently. “Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”
This is pretty much the opposite of what made Twitter any good in the first place. Musk’s stated objective of transforming X into an “everything app” incorporating services from banking to movies would be laughably hubristic at the best of times. But this is not the best of times for X, with its declining user figures and plummeting revenues.
None of this would matter that much if it was just about one egomaniac destroying a platform whose best days were behind it. But Twitter/X still plays a disproportionately large and increasingly poisonous role in global political culture. Musk’s tolerance for and seeming encouragement of lies on the site could be seen during last weekend’s Hamas attack, when he promoted accounts known for disseminating false information.
On Tuesday the European Commission said it had information that “violent and terrorist content” was being spread on the platform. Under the EU’s new Digital Services Act, Musk could be fined 6 per cent of its revenue or face a complete European blackout.
I’m not waiting around for that. Last weekend’s events brought home the fact that none of the reasons I joined Twitter 14 years ago, and that had kept me on the site ever since, exist any more. It’s not useful. It’s not surprising. It’s not informative. And it’s certainly not fun. Time to say goodbye.
