What now?

Twitter apocalypse bunker part II

Twitter auctioned off this light in the early days of Musk’s reign. (Photo: Heritage Global Partners)

The Twitter apocalypse continueth. The latest developments: As of the morning of yesterday, April 7, the platform was limiting the circulation of posts containing Substack links. You could post a tweet with a Substack link, but it wouldn’t show up on the timeline and no one could like, reply, or retweet it. By the afternoon, Twitter started marking links to Substack as “unsafe.” You also couldn’t embed tweets in Substack. The reasoning behind this remains opaque, but seems to have to do with Substack’s decision to announce an impending Twitter competitor called “Notes.”

All this is very stupid, because, as many people have pointed out, writers who use both Substack and Twitter are doing Twitter a favor by producing free material for the platform. And if you earn significant revenue from paid Substack subscriptions (I don’t), it seems fairly likely that—faced with a choice between a platform that pays you nothing and a platform that pays you something—you will choose the latter.

This is particularly true for big-name writers with a lot of paid Substack subscribers—like, say, Matt Taibbi, the “Twitter Files” reporter who has done a great deal to promote Musk’s favored view of the platform as a wasteland of censorship before Musk showed up to save the day. Taibbi announced late yesterday that he would be leaving Twitter because of the decision to throttle Substack links. “When I asked [Twitter] how I was supposed to market my work,” Taibbi wrote, “I was given the option of posting my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.” This seems to underline Musk’s total misunderstanding of the company he purchased for $44 billion.

But this is only the most recent and absurd Twitter scandal. Earlier this week, Musk apparently decided to tag NPR—an outlet that receives less than 1% of its funding from the federal government—as “state-affiliated media,” a label elsewhere used for publications like RT and the Chinese outlet People’s Daily. (He later said this might have been a mistake, but the label remains.) Before that, Twitter removed the New York Times’s blue verification check in a fit of pique.

So … what now?

At this point, the platform is clearly hostile to any journalism done with integrity. And yet the question of how to handle Twitter’s descent into malevolent absurdity is, I think, somewhat different for people who rely on the platform for their work—including journalists—than it is for others. Journalists use Twitter to keep track of what’s happening in real time. (There is no way I could have tracked the goings-on in the Trump arraignment with sufficient speed without having Tweetdeck open on my computer.) We use it to connect with experts, sources, and each other. And we use it to speak to our readership. As I wrote shortly after Musk took over:

It would be easier to wave goodbye without a second thought if not for the fact that, for writers like yours truly, the app represents years of effort building an audience and a regular platform for distributing our work. In this respect, Twitter was both a godsend and a curse. It gave young writers and artists who hadn’t yet established themselves a way to get their foot in the door. (In more than one instance, I’ve had editors at publications reach out to me either over DM or because they were interested in one of my tweets.)

I was one of the people who created a Mastodon account in the early days of the Musk takeover and began experimenting with the platform. I still think that the Fediverse’s model of decentralized social media is the most interesting and exciting of the many Twitter alternatives out there—certainly more so than just moving everything to another privately-owned mega-platform. But after some early experimentation, I’ve faltered in my Mastodon usage over the last few months. And yes, I have gone back to relying more on Twitter. This may just be a moral failure on my part, but I think the reasons why are important to understand for any effort to move us away from our collective reliance on Twitter under Musk.

Over at Platformer, Casey Newton wonders why journalists can’t quit Twitter. Andy Bell, meanwhile, has given a good overview of some of the problems with Mastodon here: there just aren’t as many people; the communities present are less diverse; there’s a defensiveness about criticism of the platform; and “always seems to be a weird atmosphere which I can’t put my finger on,” which Bell suggests is “caused by an extreme effort to keep it pleasant and not like Twitter.” I would submit that for journalists in particular—or, really, anyone who tries to communicate information to help inform the public—these problems are magnified because of the nature of what we’re trying to do.

There’s an unevenness in who migrated over to Mastodon right away. The cybersecurity and information security communities, for example, seem right at home there, whereas political and legal reporters and commentators have largely (but not entirely) stayed on Twitter. That means that if you’re a cybersecurity reporter, Mastodon is a lot more useful to you than it is to someone who writes about politics in terms of your ability to keep an eye on what expert communities are talking about.

But, importantly, this is true not only for your ability to consume information, but also for your ability to disseminate it. I write because I want to help people understand what’s happening. There are far fewer people on Mastodon, so publishing only to Mastodon simply doesn’t help inform as many people as publishing to Twitter. This problem is magnified further because so many journalists use Twitter to consume information, and therefore take cues from what what they see on the platform in terms of deciding what to cover and how to think about it. This was always one of Twitter’s quirks: it always drove relatively little traffic to media outlets, and yet was hugely influential in how it shaped the broader conversation. In other words, posting to Twitter is useful not only because it helps me inform a broader audience of laypeople, but also because it might catch the eye of another writer who might keep in mind what I say when they decide how to write about the issue I’m commenting on. (Edit: Dan Drezner makes a similar point about the nature of networks over at his Substack this morning, which I could not link to on Twitter because of the restrictions that Musk has imposed.)

I’m conscious that every time I post to Twitter, I’m giving a man I loathe free content and helping, in an infinitesimal way, to make his platform valuable. I don’t want to elide that moral difficulty for myself by simply shrugging and saying “well, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.” And yet, abandoning Twitter will significantly affect my ability to perform my job—not just the insular, self-referential aspects of journalism where we all tweet the same joke at one another about the latest stupid thing Donald Trump said, but the actually important part of journalism, which is helping a broader audience understand the world.

I worry, too, that digital media’s dependence on Twitter as a platform will lead to a cascade of negative effects as Musk further chips away at what he purchased and the platform’s influence begins to ebb. It doesn’t drive traffic, but it does help information travel, and so driving people away from the service or messing with the algorithm to substantially alter what information surfaces will also affect what kind of news circulates and how. I’m reminded of the catastrophic “pivot to video” of the mid- 2010s, when news organizations began laying off writers and moving toward video content because of a tweak in Facebook’s metrics for user engagement that artificially juiced numbers for videos posted on the platform. What kinds of content will news organizations start to produce in order to float to the top of Twitter’s new algorithm? Are we all just going to be publishing hate-reads about Elon Musk? How do we get out of this cycle?

I genuinely don’t know. Perhaps we’re in an intermediate period where Twitter’s potential competitors haven’t sufficiently geared up. (Mastodon, for the love of god, please add quote-posts.) As Gramsci wrote, the old world is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of Musk.