You screwed up badly, kid.
Twitter is a disaster truck company that is successful in spite of itself, and there is no way to grow users and revenue without making a series of huge compromises that will eventually destroy your reputation and potentially cause serious damage to your other businesses.
I say this with full confidence because the problems are with Twitter no technical problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. Its trump card is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities and other people who should know better, but still keep posting. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You are the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.
The problem when the trump card is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, mainly when that authority rests with one powerful person.
What I mean is that you are now the king of Twitter, and people think you are personally responsible for everything that happens on Twitter right now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs are usually killed when the shit goes sideways.
Here are some examples: you can write so many polite letters to advertisers as you wish, but you can’t reasonably expect to receive any meaningful ad revenue if you don’t promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means banning racism, sexism, transphobia, and all sorts of other expressions that are completely legal in the United States but make people look like total assholes. So you can make all the “free speech” promises you want, but the boring reality is that you still have to ban a lot of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys will venomously turn on you, just like they turn on any other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
Actually, there’s one step before you try to get the ad money: it turns out most people don’t want to participate in horribly unmoderated internet spaces full of worthless racists and not-all-male fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is for them to have fun experiences and feel validated all the time. They want to live in Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you need to make the experience much, much more enjoyable. That means more aggressive moderation! Again, any “alternative” social network learned this lesson the hard way. Like, about and about and about again.
Also, anyone who cries out for “freedom of speech” conveniently ignores that the greatest threat to free speech in America is the… damn government, who seems totally bored with the First Amendment. they are here ban books, Elon! President Joe Biden and Former President Donald Trump Have Identical Policy Positions on Section 230: They Want Both revoke it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech rules, they continue to threaten to repeal the law that allows social networks to indirectly pressure content policies. It’s not subtle!
State governments are even less subtle: Both Texas and Florida have passed speech rules that openly tell social media companies how to moderate, in open hostility to the First Amendment. Figuring out how to comply with these laws isn’t a technical problem (not least because compliance may be impossible). It is a legal problem because these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and the only appropriate response to them is to tell the government shut up and go away. (A big problem here is that the courts are pretty stupid about the internet!) A challenge to these laws, in part funded by Twittergoes to the Supreme Court, which is the opposite of a predictable system: it’s a group of uncool lunatics with lifetime appointments who radically reshape American life however you want. You can’t use AI on this problem: you have to go out there and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, of which taxes you like and whose governors you? seem quite fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like? Are you ready to sit before Congress and politely decline to participate in their content capture sessions for hours on end? Are you ready to do this without the incredibly respected policy experts whose leader did you harass first and then fire? You have signed up for this. It’s much more boring than rockets, cars and rockets with cars on them.
And it gets even worse when you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to show off the German language laws? I would bet not. Indian government basically demands social media companies offer potential hostages to operate in that country; you can’t get out of it. Are you ready to experience the pressure Twitter faces in the Middle East to block and restrict accounts? Are you ready for the Iranian government to start killing people through their social media posts? (Are you ready for how? Twitter is used by Iranians protesting against that government straight away?) Are you excited that the Chinese government is finding ways to threaten Tesla’s huge company in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen.
The essential truth of any social network is that the product is content moderation and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes – it’s the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what makes YouTube, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to encourage good things, discourage bad things, and remove the really bad things. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to ten minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second advertising space in the midst. That’s content moderation, honey – YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in right now. The longer you fight it or pretend you can sell something else, the more Twitter drags you into the deepest possible mud of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech rules across the country and the world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.
Anyway, welcome to hell. This was your idea.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.