“Twitter super-users” have “become the unacknowledged class that determined which events and ideas were considered important in America”

Yesterday I wrote about Twitter. Today someone on Twitter posted an article by Eve Fairbanks about the decline of Twitter. She writes, “Elon Musk’s platform may be hell, but it’s also where huge amounts of reputational and social wealth are invested.”

Here is a taste Fairbanks’s piece at Wired:

Twitter exponentially intensified the existing inequality in elites’ reach. In my field, I was told—and came to feel—that I had to target my work toward the biggest Twitter accounts. A retweet from someone with millions of followers appeared to be the only thing that separated a piece of work that made no difference to the world and one that made a huge difference. Last year, a top editor at Insider delivered a memo to his writers alerting them that their performance would be judged by “impact points,” which would be determined in part by how much “huge” Twitter commentators interacted with them. This became the attitude of a whole range of publications’ executives—particularly lefty ones, whom research has shown rely substantially more on Twitter than conservatives do. “Huge” Twitter users were those with nearly a million followers or more, a minute subsection of journalists. Tens of thousands of American aspiring writers were publishing and tweeting in no small part to juice the interest of a tiny set of elite opinion makers. 

These Twitter super-users became the unacknowledged class that determined which events and ideas were considered important in America, and especially in lefty America. That might seem just to mirror the authority once held by top editors at The New York Times. But the differences are that, once seated, these arbiters could basically never be unseated. Someone can’t get fired from the Twitter elite or even substantially demoted; even if they get suspended, when they come back all their followers automatically reappear. It’s not an accident that the general discourse feels more static than it used to. It’s partly because of Twitter. 

But also this:

I can’t imagine following the breaking-news events I’ve been able to witness virtually—the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the invasion of the US Capitol—on another platform. It’s in these real once-in-history moments that Twitter comes alive. It doesn’t silo people into friend circles like Facebook or promote groupthink quite like Reddit. The barrier to entry for people who want to add to the story is lower than on TikTok or Instagram. You don’t need to angle for a photo or a video; you can tweet while hiding under a desk, or even—as Alexei Navalny does, hand-writing tweets he delivers to his lawyer—from prison.

People giddy to see Musk fall on his face might not fully know what role Twitter plays day to day in many other countries. We’ve heard about Twitter’s role in the Arab Spring but less about how the political life of, for instance, Zimbabwe—run by a repressive government that cracks down ruthlessly on physical protests and political speech—now takes place on Twitter. Twitter has become “our political meeting point,” says Tinashe Mushakavanhu, a Zimbabwean journalist. The app’s anonymity has allowed “a discourse about the country that is very free, very critical.”

And finally this:

Twitter taught us things. We’ve learned we can dare to enter spaces—rooms where the gentry are speaking—we might not have tried to get into before. And at the same time, we’ve learned that the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own, especially ideas that stoke lulz or predict a civilization-ending crisis. We’ve learned that everything is shocking, unbelievable, unprecedented—and, simultaneously, that nothing really matters. 

Read the entire piece here.

The fact that I learned about this article on Twitter is worth noting. I love Twitter. I learn about things on Twitter. I find new things to read and blog about. Sometimes important news breaks on Twitter before it breaks anywhere else. And as a historian, I have been curating evangelical tweets for several years now. Some people think my twice-weekly evangelical roundups are meant to critique my fellow believers. While there is certainly some of that, I started doing this for the sake of my own research. When I write the third volume of this series, I will be relying on those roundups for anecdotes and story lines. Stay tuned.

On the other hand, as I chronicled yesterday, I’m going to have to do better on Twitter. I will no longer advance ideas at this site apart from sharing posts from Current and responding to private messages when appropriate.