Digital Watch

I’m writing this in quasi-quarantine, thanks to a visit from what we are assuming is chicken pox. It’s been a bit like a return to the lockdown days, only we’ve doubled our number of children and one of them seems to have been prematurely promoted into a leadership role.

Even those of us who’ve spent the last week or so being ordered to sing the opening song from Tangled every so often will likely have picked up on the news that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter for $44bn.

There are numerous debates circulating, including whether and how he’ll be able to make it profitable with shifts to the revenue model and cost cutting. But it’s not the value of the deal, or Twitter’s revenue model, that makes it interesting (and helpfully Musk himself agrees). Instead, it invites questions about what Twitter is, how it operates, and how we feel about it.

Twitter started as a micro-blogging site that allowed users to post information to followers. Over 200 million accounts now use it daily, and it makes its money mostly from advertising, plus a bit from data licensing. Notably, it uses many open-source programme applications in its delivery, and also shares APIs to make sure Twitter can be integrated with other web experiences. Musk has expressed a desire for total transparency around the algorithms at work, again underlining a view that says this isn’t really about money. Though it could certainly be about power. These days, Twitter is part digital forum, part integrated digital tool for sharing real-time information, and of course – it’s also a marketing engine trying to deploy increasingly automated approaches to engage/ensnare (you pick) consumers. If that sounds confusing and octopus-like, it’s because it is.

Twitter’s >200m daily users are still dwarfed by the >1.9billion who use Facebook, or ~1bn who use WhatsApp. But these numbers are (mostly) beside the point. Twitter has become a global platform where powerful and influential individuals and organisations share information in real-time. In that sense, it’s been likened to the world’s digital ‘town square’. This is a cutesy bit of imagery but it’s misleading. It implies there might be a reasonably strong relationship between what’s happening on Twitter, and what’s happening in the world.

And that’s where the town square gets weird. First, the users of Twitter aren’t representative of the population. Second, the views expressed on Twitter can be engineered and manipulated by those with agendas to create distinctions, divisions and negativity where there is none.

There is an interesting psychological underpin to why our consumption of vast quantities of information (which Twitter encourages) may engender certain behaviours, including overly focussing on negatives and seeking confirmation from our own communities. You don’t need a psychology degree to worry that these tendencies might warp our online spaces, even before algorithms and bots get involved.

A great many hours are being devoted to making sense of the behaviours and data that Twitter and other social media platforms create. But what about asking ourselves what we actually want? Clearly there is value (and joy!) in sharing information and connecting online, as there is in real life. Let’s say what we really care about is the spread of quality information and ideas. The meaningful currency becomes trust. Is that trust compatible with a single, private, owner?