Blog

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Welcome to Twitterdome

Main Takeaways:

• Musk has more headroom with Twitter than most are acknowledging.
• The individuals opining on Twitter and its fate are generally progressives and see Twitter as it is--a progressive-focused medium, which prevents them from seeing how it can expand.

Background

Anyone on Twitter or tuned into the mediasphere knows by now that Elon Musk has assumed control of Twitter. With that change in ownership, many people are considering, warning of, or actually taking their leave of Twitter because of the change in leadership, and Musk's dedication to a more open, less moderated forum.

Interestingly, up until the moment that Elon Musk announced he wanted to purchase Twitter, people were complaining about rampant racism and threats on Twitter: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc. Then, Twitter became a well-moderated platform for a couple months, but now that Musk has taken over and has said he wants to reduce moderation, the argument is that it will newly be a forum for awful people.

As a longtime listener of The Verge Podcast, I would recommend listening to this emergency episode which discusses the details of the purchase and some predictions. I reluctantly also recommend reading Nilay Patel's piece "Welcome To Hell, Elon." Reluctantly because Nilay, like the speakers in the podcast, while very knowledgeable about the issues are also quite carried by their political biases. It's pretty clear from their analysis that they strongly dislike Musk, which as a long-time listener, I noticed became quite strong as he staked a heterodox and free-speech political positions. As you listen/read, keep in mind that their analysis is tainted by this bias. Still, they raise some thoughtful arguments. One of which is that Elon will have to keep advertisers happy to succeed. They're not the only ones to argue this.

Listening to them, I was struck by the idea that they may be missing the forest for the trees. Because of their biases, they fail to see that Musk has quite a lot of space, actually, to expand. Only 22% of Americans use Twitter. This compares to 69% who use Facebook and 73% who use YouTube. Even Instagram has 37%.

In addition, Twitter's user base is heavily skewed towards Democrats and progressives. Even the employee base is skewed towards progressives.

While the user base is skewed towards the left, the more important skew is that it encourages engagement, which encourages extremism on both sides. There are enough awful people on that platform to attack a person proclaiming any position, left or right, or even moderate.

These all lead to the potential for Twitter to broaden its base and expand towards the middle. If Musk can figure out a way to make sure that the people departing the platform are on the extreme left, (and there's a good chance already that the people who are leaving are the ones who are most hostile to free speech), and also figure out a way to better incentive moderation in tone, it's possible that he can get Twitter to appeal to even more people.

A 22% share of adults is embarrassing for an app that begs to be used to pass a couple minutes--at the doctor's office, during commercial breaks, at red lights. If Musk can pull off the two things above, then advertisers will be happy to go along. Advertisers already focus on broad audience messages (at least broad in tone, not so much in specific targets for products).