The Twittering

Cast your mind back to the warmer climes of April. It’s then we learned that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had become the largest individual shareholder of popular social media platform, Twitter. Things after that got a little messy, but ultimately resulted in him becoming the sole private owner. The deal was cut and dried, and Musk got on with making the management changes and restructures to match his vision and leadership style. Why then, so many months later, is his ownership journey still making headlines? Are the stories of millions of users leaving the platform and mass layoffs true?

Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a social media service which allows users to post short messages or “Tweets” to their followers. These messages are limited to 280 characters, and can include images or video. While it’s fairly popular, with around 436 million active users each month, that puts it only around a third as popular as Instagram. After Musk’s purchase, Twitter has seen fairly major internal restructuring. Several executives have been fired, and hundreds of employees have opted for voluntary severance rather than being part of his vision for an “extremely hardcore” revamp of the site. It’s gone from around 7,500 employees to just over 2,000 in the last eight months. While the company isn’t without its history of making headlines, these changes have seen prolific reporting.

These layoffs and sweeping adaptations do appear to be paying off however. Musk reports that Twitter has gone from a forecast of losing around $3 billion next year to being roughly cash flow break even. This in spite of reports of a predicted four percent drop in users for 2023. Also teased by the platform is a new, paid-for way of becoming a verified user and being able to use the associated blue checkmark on your account. This is a (if slightly paywalled) way of tackling the huge number of fake Twitter accounts impersonating high-profile individuals. It’s a combination of all of these changes, plus the threat of having to pay for being verified, which is driving those reports of people leaving for other social media outlets.

Providing the issues of technical struggles during this transition, bad press and a much leaner workforce can be overcome, I think it’s safe to say that Twitter may pay dividends in the long term. Despite everything, the fact that we’re still very much talking about it proves that the company has lost none of it’s social relevance. The alternatives to Twitter’s microblog style don’t really mirror the original. The most popular jumping off point for people wishing to migrate their socials is Mastodon, which while gaining new users rapidly, is a totally different and decentralized experience. Twitter as it stands is the “better the devil you know” option.

The next year will be an interesting one for social media platforms in general as more enter the space, and the existing players grapple with how to differentiate while maintaining the transparency we now all expect. While Twitter continues to make headlines, let’s not lose focus of why these platforms exist in the first place. For me, I think it’s more important to find a social outlet which best fits your preferred way of sharing ideas, rather than becoming bogged down in the politics.