In the past, I've railed against making predictions about the future as a way to understand the present. This is different than predictions used as a way of dealing with uncertainty through humor - a pretty common, totally understandable reaction to crises. I'm thinking more of op-ed hot takes that seem to want to be taken seriously.
Predictions like this are often so vague that they're impossible to prove wrong. For example, if I predict that Twitter/Facebook/Reddit will die/fail, how and when will I know if this turns out to be true? If their userbases, sometime over the next 5 years, decline by 35%, have they died/failed? How about 50%? Do we have to wait another 5 years to judge the prophecy? There's also the problem of lacking a counterfactual. If something horrible happens after someone uses social media, we can't compare it to a world in which they did not use social media. It's possible the horrible thing would have happened anyway (or perhaps something even...horribler?), just through some other mechanism. There is no disincentive for continuing to make bold, wrong predictions because there is no mechanism for keeping score, no highly visible public record of wrong takes (though spectacularly wrong takes do tend to catch flak).
And yet I'm finding it hard not to use the occasion of Elon Musk's (apparently successful?) attempt to buy Twitter as a time to indulge in some predictions. I'll compensate for this indulgence by offering something more in the spirit of this blog - using the occasion as a way to gain insight into something more general about the uses and impact of social media. But first...
I can think of two likely scenarios:
Scenario 1: very little changes. Twitter use habits, like any kind of habit, are hard to change. There have been many instances in which social media platforms have done something that users have not liked, but most users do not then abandon the platform. We can more easily recall the instances in which they did abandon the platform: MySpace and Digg come to mind for me. But it seems that nearly every significant change to a platform - be it functionality, moderation policy, or ownership - tends not to result in a wholesale change in user behavior. The "culture" of Twitter may change, but linking this to Musk's ownership can be a tricky claim to verify, as cultures are always changing. In this scenario, there is no massive change in Twitter discourse (i.e., who participates and what is said or amplified) that can be directly and obviously linked to Musk's ownership of the platform. A handful of influential Twitter users on the Left will defect, as will a few hundred thousand less-influential users (including many journalists who will write about the experience). They will be displaced by a few newly influential users on the Right and a few hundred thousand less-influential tech bros and Far Right/Alt Right users. Musk might put the worst of the Far Right users in seemingly random "time outs," less out of any political conviction and more to reassert dominance get a laugh at their righteous indignation at having their trust betrayed. Losing the revenue they generate through ad exposure or subscriptions won't hurt, but the board will chastise him for playing fast and loose and he'll promise to be better. Pundits will pin everything the Right does on Musk and Twitter, but the connection won't be obvious and the claims won't be of interest to anyone outside of a bubble of journalists, news junkies, and academics. I consider this the more likely of the two scenarios.
Scenario 2: things go poorly, less because of how Musk changes the functioning of the site and more because of the signal it sends to current and potential users. Far Right fringe groups and apolitical trolls will see Musk's unwillingness to regulate content as an invitation to push things as far as they can, inciting small-but-significant numbers of Far Right "activists" to engage in terrorism and assassination. A handful of violent political acts will be linked to Twitter in a way that will seem obvious and undeniable, not just to readers of New York Times opinion pieces but to the average politically-disengaged citizen, who will come to associate Musk and all his brands (e.g., Tesla, SpaceX) with toxicity rather than innovation. Musk will then belatedly recognize the damage to his brands and sell the company.
So as to make these scenarios more falsifiable, I'll say that one will happen by the end of 2023.
With that out of the way, I'll return to the title of the blog post, returning to a topic that I'd like to write about at greater length in the future: what is the nature of influence on social media platforms, and how does it differ (in duration, scope, domain-specificity, etc.) from mass media or face-to-face influence?
In thinking about the possibility of influential Twitter users defecting to another platform, I realized that platform-abandonment might involve losing one's audience and the attendant influence. All fine and well to say "follow me to YouTube/TikTok/Substack/Tumblr/Medium/Mastadon/whatever!", but it's hard to coordinate a mass exodus to another platform, and harder still to sustain that interest over time, especially when the new content home offers more of an a la carte content experience rather than the smorgasbord we've come to expect from popular platforms. Smaller platforms have trouble handling large influxes of digital refugees. Perhaps especially high-profile influencers will easily move their following to another platform (or to podcasting), but what of the Twitter users with followings of 500 to 50,000? How portable is their influence?
Those who jump ship may lose some of their audience but find a more intimate relationship between themselves and a smaller group of followers on another platform, and this may be more rewarding for them. Those who stick around a less-regulated Twitter may find themselves in more direct battles with other users with whom they disagree than had previously been the case. The 'block' function and tweaks to the much-discussed-but-poorly-understood algorithms will help determine how easy it is for users to tolerate dissent in the name of maintaining influence. But no matter how it shakes out, I think we can learn something about influence by seeing what happens to the public personae of Twitter users with decent-sized followings who leave Twitter. Maybe Twitter's loss will be YouTube's/TikTok's/Substack's/Tumblr's/Reddit's gain, both in terms of users and in terms of cultural influence, however one chooses to define and measure that slippery concept.
