With all of the colossal stupidity going on at Elon Musk's Twitter, and all of the debate about how it should operate, what free speech is and the wider implications of the non-business model it's heading toward, there's a pretty obvious thing being overlooked.
The world can get by without Twitter.
I guess I'm kind of surprised that anyone values it as much as they do (it's definitely not worth $44 billion). When it first launched, forums, blogs and blog comments that could close the link loop were the center of the universe. Everyone was like, "What am I gonna do with 140 characters?" iPhones weren't a thing yet. People sat down at their desk during the day, with AOL Instant Messenger open, and would spontaneously ping someone to talk about nothing in particular. If you break this down to the fundamental social models involved, this isn't really that different from the world we're in now, with its platforms, save for one important difference.
Twitter I would argue was the start of a transition to performative social media. Everything that came before it, including Facebook in its university-only years, involved a more closed loop. The people that you reached were generally only people that you knew, or people of a smaller community with common interests. When you have a practically infinite audience, everything changes. Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has said in many interviews that Twitter is addcitive for performers. The thing is, you don't have to be a professional performer for public social media. So that dopamine hit for likes is strong. These days, people put "influencer" on their resume. These are very weird times.
But Twitter is not the center of the universe. If it disappeared, something else could take its place. Furthermore, issues of "free speech" are grossly misunderstood, in that the only right that you have to it is from government. Businesses can moderate their platforms anyway they'd like, ironically enough because that moderation itself is protected free speech. The platforms don't really matter anyway, because if you have access to the Internet, you can put anything you'd like on it, provided it's legal. Obviously, that right is paired with responsibility, but that's true of everything you might choose to say.
My bigger point is probably that we've become so accustomed to huge Internet platforms that we don't remember what it was like before them. In a lot of ways, it was better, because you weren't held to every whim of an algorithm that isn't really tuned to your interest as much as it is tuned to engagement. You're the product. We also forget that if the format of Twitter is really all that valuable, something can take its place. That's how the Internet operates. If Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all went away, there would be other things.
I think we'd all be better off with less performative Internet media. It seemed like people were finally getting tired of doom scrolling, but now we have TikTok. It seems like we need a phone to do things out in the world now, which makes me want to engage socially that way even less.
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