Elon Musk has owned Twitter for a year now. In that time, he has slashed the company’s value and rendered it unrecognizable to many users. Now the platform’s organizing principle is its owner’s whims.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
53 Dizzying Weeks
One year and a week ago, Elon Musk posted a video of himself walking into Twitter headquarters holding a sink. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he wrote on the platform. A dizzying series of changes—to Twitter’s structure, value, staff, and name—have unfolded in the 53 weeks since. No one is quite sure what to call the platform now—X? Twitter? X, formerly Twitter? And it’s equally unclear what the platform is now, beyond a place for Musk to force-feed his fantasies and ambitions to the site’s dwindling number of users.
I used to go on Twitter, laugh at the posts that flowed across my feed, and think about how I was watching the logic of the free market at work. The idea that the most hilarious posts were generally getting the most likes and retweets—even though I knew there were algorithms at play—struck me as democratic and sort of nice. Now the logic of the market has given way to the logic of Musk. In February, Platformer reported that Musk had changed the algorithm to promote his own tweets to more users; also, paid users now get their replies boosted when they engage with a post (another expression of the free market at work, I suppose). Musk’s account has an outsize role in elevating content: Researchers with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public looked at seven highly influential accounts accounts that cumulatively boasted 1.6 billion views posting about the Israel-Hamas war and found that “with the exception of one … all had received replies from Musk since his acquisition of Twitter.” Musk has personally directed users to accounts spreading misinformation (he posted and deleted a recommendation to follow two such accounts in the hours following Hamas’s attack on Israel), and he has used his perch to engage with all manner of odious content. In February, for example, he defended Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist who made racist statements.
Since taking over, Musk has expressed various ambitions for the site: He has indicated that X will be an “everything app” along the lines of China’s WeChat, which combines shopping, banking, and social media. Just this week, he expressed interest in X becoming a dating app too. (X, which quickly slashed most of its communications team along with some 80 percent of employees under Musk’s leadership, did not respond to a request for comment beyond its form response of “Busy now, check back later.” This reply, though not very useful, is at least an upgrade from its press email’s previous form response of a poop emoji.)
But so far, the site has mostly just morphed into what its owner said it could never be. “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape,” Musk wrote when he bought it—even as he quickly dissolved a trust-and-safety advisory council and many employees with expertise on disinformation left the company. He reinstated accounts that had been banned under previous content rules, including that of Donald J. Trump (Trump has so far stuck to his own site, Truth Social). According to a report from The New York Times, anti-Semitic content and engagement with pro-Kremlin accounts have surged since Musk’s takeover, as have racial and ethnic slurs on the site. Linda Yaccarino, who joined the company as CEO over the summer, has largely defended her boss and X’s direction.
By many measures, X has shrunk in influence and value under Musk’s leadership. The site is hemorrhaging users: Although Musk has tried hard to increase engagement on his own tweets, The Washington Post reported that 30 percent fewer people are now actively posting to the site. Musk bought the company—which had been public since 2013—for $44 billion. According to The New York Times, stock grants that the company handed out on Monday indicated that it is worth closer to $19 billion now. Musk himself said a few months ago that ad revenue was down 50 percent.
Most Americans were never really on Twitter. In early 2021, just 23 percent of adults in the U.S. said they used the site. But for those who did use it—and especially for members of the media, public figures, and academic researchers—it was a valuable tool. It has also played a significant role in social movements such as the Arab Spring by enabling protesters and activists to share real-time updates on the site. Musk has made it much harder for academics to conduct research about the platform and has, through his new subscription model, given preference to any account that pays for a blue check. Blue checks used to be a marker of status and authenticity on the site. Now any user can buy one for $8 a month, rendering them basically useless for verifying which accounts and information are trustworthy.
Pre-Musk Twitter wasn’t a utopia: The company had long had frequent technical difficulties and a hazy business model. And even in the days of more robust content moderation, users were needled, bullied, and harassed on the platform. On a new Vox podcast series about the site, Peter Kafka explores how, long before Musk, the company had trouble deciding exactly what the site was. Was it a tool for free expression? For celebrities to reach fans? For journalists to one-up one another? Was it just a Facebook competitor in a frothy VC moment?
Now the site’s purpose is clearer, though also much more frightening: It’s a tool for Musk to do whatever he wants, and users are feeling the difference. My colleague Charlie Warzel told me that the app used to be like high school, with its cliques and weirdos and sense of free-flowing fun. Time spent on the platform could be a formative experience for users. But, he added, “much like high school, it’s probably unhealthy if you don’t get out of there after a while.”
Looking at a place you once knew—regardless of your relationship to it—and finding it altered almost beyond recognition is jarring. When he took over, Musk aimed to rid the site of what he has often called the “woke mind virus.” Over the past year, he has indeed presided over a clear rightward shift, but he has also rid the site of something else: its distinct character.
Related:
Today’s News
- The first group of civilian evacuees to leave Gaza crossed into Egypt.
- A Cornell student who was charged for threatening to kill his Jewish classmates appeared in court today.
- Donald Trump Jr. testified as a defendant in his father’s New York civil fraud trial; he is the first of the former president’s children to do so.
Evening Read
Evolution Didn’t Wire Us for Eight Hours of Sleep
By Elizabeth Preston
On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city dweller who stayed up doomscrolling on their smartphone.
Research has shown that people in nonindustrial societies—the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in—average less than seven hours a night, says David Samson, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. That’s a surprising number when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, monkey, or lemur that scientists have studied. Chimps sleep about nine and a half hours out of every 24.
Cotton-top tamarins sleep about 13. Three-striped night monkeys are technically nocturnal, though, really, they’re hardly ever awake—they sleep for 17 hours a day.
Samson calls this discrepancy the human sleep paradox. “How is this possible, that we’re sleeping the least out of any primate?” he says.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. “The Heart,” a new poem by Grady Chambers:
“The heart was small and made of paper. I found it on the floor of my apartment, / struck by the similarity: It matched in shape and color the heart that she’d discovered / stitched to the sleeve of her robe.”
Listen. Taylor Swift’s album 1989 charmingly nailed a shared experience of dating as a marketplace.
P.S.
Even as X deteriorates, some of its capacity for surprise remains. This Halloween post from Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, managed to fuse multiple niche topics in fewer than 240 characters. Finding a space that allows staid public figures to attempt to communicate using voice and humor is rare, and I, for one, was delighted with what he wrote on the platform yesterday:
“If Satoshi Nakamoto went as Satoshi Nakamoto for Halloween, would we be able to tell?
Happy 15th anniversary to Satoshi’s famous white paper that started crypto.
Any crypto companies that are tricking investors should start treating them to compliance with the securities laws.”
One of the top replies captured my sentiments nicely: “What.”
— Lora
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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