“Rand Paul.” “Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard.” “Something in the Water.” “Leaving Twitter.” “Sony.” And of course “Elon.” These are some of the top trending hashtags on U.S. Twitter today. In other words, it’s what society thinks matters right now.
While debating with a friend about the free speech/hate speech/misinformation and societal control implications of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, my exasperated friend said in surrender, “What does it matter anyway? I barely use Twitter anymore.” By “barely,” I think they meant that they spend far less time on Twitter compared to other places on the internet.
The same is true for me. In fact, I’ve personally never Tweeted, though I’ve been quoted on others’ tweets and I occasionally quickly glance at my Twitter feed or hop to a Tweet linked in an article posted on other media. Nevertheless, Twitter still matters – a lot. I would contend that the impact of 5 minutes per week on Twitter is far more consequential in terms of information conveyed and consumed than any amount of time on all other social media platforms combined. This is thanks to this unique combination of features:
- the character limitation and use of hashtags – this makes synthesis and analysis of site content easier than the longer form narrative written content, or audio/video content from just about every other media platform out there, such as news outlets, video sharing platforms, podcasts and websites. Even Google, with its cutting-edge natural language processing and knowledge graph capabilities isn’t able to collapse information as succinctly as Twitter.
- the summarization of content – This makes it possible both to convey (through a like, hashtag or short comment) and especially digest a lot of information in just a 60 second scroll down a news feed or, in my case, a 10 second glance at the trending hashtags.
- the broad appeal – A diverse set of people use Twitter: politicians, business professionals, techy types, political prisoners and activists, journalists, young people and even Wall Street investors. This makes it possible to get the widest possible view on topics pertinent to many, such as an election, company, environmental initiative or protest movement.
Put another way, Twitter is the closest thing we have to a society-wide weather vane. But why does this matter?
I go back to an old Lockheed Martin radio commercial in which they propose to “Turn data into knowledge and knowledge into action.” That’s because knowledge enables prediction which, when combined with an understanding of the current state of things, is extremely useful for control: the thing that humans are most fond of.
I don’t mean to imply that humanity’s desire for control is a flaw. In fact it’s exactly the reason for our success as a species. We can control the production of our food or shelter or the management of a health problem. We’ve always been control freaks, it’s just that over time, we’ve fine-tuned this skill through the scientific method combined with the power of computers to help with the analysis of the results of our experiments.
And that takes us back to why Twitter matters. A method for easily measuring the temperature or sentiment of society, whether in aggregate or sliced into chunks – and detecting emerging or waning topics and perhaps correlating those readings to other possibly influencing factors (eg how has trust in a world leader changes following a news story) – well that’s a powerful ability that all humans would like to have.
The prior owners of Twitter felt that this level of data/knowledge/control was too dangerous to expose in full to the masses. So the solution included the following approaches:
- to “manipulate” or “massage” the data – the choice of word depends on your point of view – through content moderation
- to adjust and continually tune the news feed algorithm to control what is seen
- to control which influencers are allowed to even use Twitter and contribute to the pool of data, due to their ability to change the hearts and minds of large groups of people
Elon Musk is controversial right now specifically because he’s talking about doing away with or at least greatly decreasing these interventions, which would have the effect of improving the quality of data and therefore the power and relevance of Twitter in our society. This does assume, of course, that there is not a substantial drop-off in subscribers or major shift in use.
Whether or not you believe that society will be mostly helped or mostly harmed through full access to such a public sentiment thermometer, there’s no question in my mind that Twitter really matters.
Note for my long-time readers: I may be setting up a Substack in the future, as that’s an easier platform for many of us to consume and it will also allow me to branch a bit further from my prior focus on nutrition, cooking, holistic living and food politics, as I’ve done in this post.
ChurnYourOwn 