The demise of Twitter: How a ‘utopian vision’ for social media became a ‘toxic mess’

Twitter’s ‘three pillars’ of verification, moderation and its trust and safety team, were dismantled swiftly after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022.Twitter’s ‘three pillars’ of verification, moderation and its trust and safety team, were dismantled swiftly after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022.If anything is emblematic of the demise of Twitter, it is the rise and stall of the account of Oprah Winfrey.

Exact numbers of active monthly users are not available, but while Twitter/X has never had the broad mainstream appeal of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok, for years it had an outsize impact on the world of news and politics. The breaking news functionality was not without its issues. While the immediacy of the platform gave voices to dissidents and citizen journalists, making it crucial for uprisings like those seen in the Arab spring, it also allowed politicians to circumvent the traditional mediation of journalists, says Bruns.

The trust and safety teams were among those fired by Musk in the wild weeks after he acquired the company for US$44bn and walked into the headquarters on his first day holding a ceramic sink. A video of Musk’s entrance was posted to the site with the caption: “Let that sink in”. “They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of moderation,” says Bruns. “To some extent that represents a broader sense in the US about free speech that it is an absolute good above all. Whereas elsewhere in Australia and Europe and many other places there’s much more about needing to balance the rights of free speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And for many otherwise quite liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, essentially.

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