Ever since the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, took over Twitter for 44 billion dollars after several weeks of grief, the dust has been rising. In performative outrage, influential and less important Twitter users are announcing that they are shutting down their Twitter accounts. The reasons vary: from the aversion to Elon Musk that some people harbor, to the threat to freedom of expression posed by a billionaire, or, on the contrary, the fear that radical elements such as Donald Trump will be allowed back onto the platform.
Others feel sorry for all the poor Twitter employees who have lost their jobs in a “brutal” way. Simply by e-mail to their private e-mail address. And it is particularly lamented that the teams responsible for ethics or inclusion have also been fired. And even Twitter founder Jack Dorsey apologized in a tweet that he no longer cared about Twitter and that this situation had now arisen.
These waves mask the fact that Twitter was actually already pretty shit beforehand. It’s definitely the most toxic of social media like Facebook or LinkedIn. And I say that as someone who has been on Twitter for exactly 14 years, uses it regularly and also has a few thousand followers.
Over the years, Twitter has done very little to combat racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and disabled users. Twitter’s response has been lame, preaching freedom of speech and expression and seeming to care less as long as it brought activity to the platform. Quite the opposite: the victims of such attacks on Twitter were felt to be blocked more often than the perpetrators. And this seems to be proving true again, as Elon Musk was amused by the uproar, which he commented on with a tweet:
But back to Twitter and the time before the takeover by Elon Musk. Even back then, the ethics and inclusion teams within Twitter seemed to be either overwhelmed and incompetent at best or, at worst, just serving as inclusion and ethics theater.
When it comes to innovation, Twitter is at the bottom of the social media league. By some distance. What has been innovative in recent years? After videos, video previews and images (in 2010, 2012 and 2013 respectively), which could be attached to tweets, the expansion of tweets from 140 to 280 characters was sold as a major innovation in 2017. A downvoting button (as a counterpart to the Like button) disappeared from my selection again this year after a few weeks. The editing function for a sent tweet or the addition of documents, which had been desired for years, did not come out of the starting blocks. Even a so-called “unroll” function, which was often desired for longer tweet sequences on a topic, came from other providers.
The bacon belt, which had accumulated 7,500 employees, seemingly failed to create a robust platform without hot-rodded code, advance the platform with innovation, have human ethics and inclusion teams do their work, or create innovation in general. Thanks to a lack of leadership, Twitter had become comfortable and complacent. In recent years, Jack Dorsey was primarily interested in his crypto adventures, while Twitter itself was floundering, as evidenced by its volatile annual results. Once a profit, then none. The source of income was 90 percent advertising revenue.
And now comes Elon Musk, an entrepreneur with numerous billion-dollar start-ups on his list of successes, who has already shaken up several industries, and brings fresh impetus to Twitter. And that suddenly gets people excited, the media hyperventilate, politicians and other opinion leaders get excited. And the Twitter before Elon Musk is suddenly seen through nostalgically glorified rose-colored glasses, and the Twitter with Elon Musk as the embodiment of evil.
As much as I am critical of Elon Musk for some of his statements and behavior, I don’t understand this outrage theater. The time to be outraged and take action was years ago.
Twitter already sucked before, it really can’t get any worse.
By the way: how shitty Twitter is has prompted me to write a book about online harassment and attacks on women on the internet. Twitter has a central place where toxic men congregate to insult, harass and threaten women. The book CYBERF*CKED will be published this week and can be ordered here.
