The most popular present on the town over the previous week or so has been Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, which is much less like a traditional merger or acquisition and extra like gladiatorial spectacle.
Whether or not Twitter is starting an extended and painful dying rattle is actually a stay chance. It’s clear Musk genuinely didn’t need to shut the deal till the corporate’s authorized motion pressured his hand, and that $44 billion was a totally absurd value for him to pay.
The spectre that Musk — the canine who caught the automotive — may not achieve his quest to make Twitter worthwhile does increase some attention-grabbing questions. Ought to he fail, most individuals will in all probability wander in a daze to regardless of the subsequent large factor is. However for my fellow media elites, it may not be such a straightforward query.
As a social media platform, Twitter has at all times been a little bit of an odd outlier. It has remained largely text-based, whilst different platforms grow to be ever extra obsessive about video. It has at all times struggled to draw giant numbers of customers, launch helpful new options, or make constant income. However regardless of these limitations, which in all probability would have crippled any of its rivals, it has managed to keep up its place because the favoured on-line area for discourse by people who find themselves within the information; who write the information; and who court docket the information.
I don’t simply imply the actual fact Donald Trump used Twitter because the command centre for his presidential ambitions. Twitter is the staging floor for the fuzzy intersection of politics, tradition, leisure and media; a spot the place the aristocratic class of digital society come collectively to each speak store and get at one another’s throats with equal enthusiasm. This each day psychodrama is usually extraordinarily annoying for anybody who has to witness it, however it’s undeniably a part of what retains the web site chugging alongside and has outsized reverberations by society at giant.
Few have benefited extra from this state of affairs than journalists. The determine of the Twitter-obsessed journo who spends their entire day on the web site and has their blinkered worldview formed by what transpires on their feed has grow to be a preferred stereotype, and one which does comprise a grain of fact.
Twitter, regardless of by no means fairly reaching the concrete worth to information organisations that Fb did at its peak, has grow to be integral to information manufacturing, distribution and brand-building for journalists. It’s the place a disproportionate quantity of reports gathering, supply discovering and hiring happens. As a pure consequence, it shapes the contours of the information cycle in methods each delicate and overt, as journalists each draw from Twitter and anticipate what Twitter’s response is perhaps to any given story.
This has in fact led to a substantial amount of bellyaching from all quarters. Journalists and editors who lower their tooth within the pre-digital age don’t like how Twitter distorts the newsmaking course of and makes private model paramount, whereas others grouse over the actual fact Twitter has made micro-celebrities and influencers out of staff of the digital media machine. (You’ll be able to have a look at Musk’s campaign towards the blue verified verify as an effort to remove what he sees as undeserved standing for the media elite, who in all probability ought to have discovered to code.)
However amid the roiling chaos of a Twitter looking for its toes amid mass layoffs and a mercurial new boss, it’s attention-grabbing to think about what journalism would possibly appear to be with out it. No platform stands prepared to really change the function Twitter occupies within the media business, regardless of what number of well-intentioned individuals fake the clunky weirdness of Mastodon is the longer term. And let’s not child ourselves that the overwhelming majority of journos have the panache to make it on TikTok.
Both means, we’re staring down the barrel of a genuinely destabilising occasion for journalism — the newest in an extended line of such occasions. Twitter has been background frequency for the business for a decade. It’s laborious to think about one thing changing it.
Wanting on the chaotic first weeks of Musk’s Twitter possession, alongside his personal admission that chapter may be very a lot on the desk, it’s straightforward to think about his free speech rescue mission going up in flames.
If something will save Twitter, it’s that it has managed to safe itself a just about unchallenged place amongst a sure subset of the web’s strongest customers.
If Musk can determine a pathway to eke cash out of these customers with out utterly alienating everybody else, he would possibly be capable to battle by important headwinds and make it work. I wouldn’t maintain my breath.
