Four thoughts on X née Twitter and Threads' chronological feed
The fracturing of social media continues
I recently spoke with a former City Council candidate for a medium-sized city in Massachusetts. She mentioned just how difficult it was to keep up with her constituents since they would email, call, text, and DM her in every possible social media app. Instagram, Facebook campaign account, Facebook personal account, Twitter, and even LinkedIn.
That landscape has shifted more since that conversation. Twitter is now X and Facebook’s Threads (the fastest app to 100 million users) will soon have a following feature that has been holding it back compared to Twitter’s usefulness for news and politics. It seems appropriate to step back and offer a roundup of how this will impact the policy and government space.
Given how new everything is, here are three thoughts on the moves and, as a reminder, here are the three ways in which social media matters for those in our world:
Following the news. One state legislator told me that she follows reporters on Twitter because will tweet about a breaking story before she hears about it through official/traditional channels. A reason why Twitter felt so important in its heyday was its role as a real-time news wire with lots of perspectives in one place.
Connecting with constituents. In our conversation with a neighborhood director for a Boston City Councillor, she talked about how vital it was to check what issues were being discussed and to respond to DMs in the same way she might with emails.
Getting out their message. Social media allows for politicians, reporters, and activists to communicate directly with the wider public, to get out their opinion or promote their other work.
1. The “town square” is moving to different parts of town
The best part of Twitter in its 2016 campaign heyday was that it was the place where everyone in US politics could go to keep up and share the latest news. I’d argue that it was still that place in 2022 when Boris Johnson’s government was imploding. As Dan Drezner convincingly wrote last month, that was no longer true for the Wagner Group’s semi-coup.
It’s not just me who arrived at the conclusion that pre-Elon Twitter was superior to Elon Twitter at providing useful information during a real-time geopolitical crisis. On Sunday Semafor’s Ben Smith wrote, “The Prigozhin rebellion was the biggest geopolitical crisis of this new media environment, and Twitter remained essential — though I found myself reading the feeds of key analysts — Max Seddon, Kevin Rothrock, Rob Lee — directly, while the main feed proved pretty useless and Elon Musk promoted growth hackers (emphasis added).”
The benefit to the old model was not in the tech or algorithm. It was that enough of the relevant people were in one place so that when a nugget of news broke, it could be quickly circulated, contexualized, and argued with. And the ease of following new accounts mean that we can quickly update our informational flow, as this State Representative in Michigan did after we inadvertently triggered a debate about inequality in who elected officials in that state follow online.
When that network fractures, we have to jump between different apps, figure out who to trust in real-time, or - as I did - follow a few people who curate information for their audience. But that places the onus on the reader to identify those trusted sources in advance and limits what can be delivered.
At that point, we might as well go back to live blogs from newspapers. That’s not a bad model, but an indictment of social media that the thing it’s supposed to be able to do - bring you information from around the world quickly - has been so polluted by noise that we leave it altogether.
If Twitter loses significant market share to Threads, that one-stop-shop for lots of different issue areas and geographies fragments further.
2. Threads needs to get to Europe fast
A fragmented social media network is less useful than a single one. A network on an app that can’t operate in the European Union is even worse.
The beauty of the personalized social media feed is that is allows you to select news that matters to you. Since my PhD was on the European Union and it’s the largest economy in the world, I’ve tried to keep up with news from Brussels. That becomes much harder if my main social media app becomes Threads and it doesn’t get approval to operate in the EU.
From The Verge:
On Monday, Rob Sherman, Meta’s chief privacy officer for police, wrote on Threads that the app currently meets the EU’s GDPR privacy requirements, “but building this offering against the backdrop of other regulatory requirements that have not yet been clarified would potentially take a lot longer, and in the face of this uncertainty, we prioritized offering this new product to as many people as possible.”
In his Hard Fork interview, Mosseri suggested that Meta would need to create new systems to prove that Threads was following all of the EU’s rules.
3. Communications and constituent services directors will have to work harder
A single social media app allows comms directors one place to get out their message and to see how it’s being received. It allows constituent services directors one message inbox for their constituents who don’t want to use email or the phone, and one place where constituents will raise concerns that should be seen.
As more apps proliferate and Twitter declines, that’s more work to tweak the message for the different mediums and jumping around to gauge feedback. This may not seem like a major problem, but it could lead to something obscure but vital that’s missed when you only have 10 minutes on a particular app rather than 20 and you don’t get past the initial scrolling.
This goes along with Twitter’s API changes that have increased costs for third-party apps that could help better manage that experience or the inability to DM someone unless you’re verified. It seems likely that these changes will hurt elected officials’ experiences within the app and lead to them not checking their DMs at all, in some cases.
4. Twitter to X might work, but at the cost of the initial purpose of the app
The announcement of X was hailed with a blizzard of jargon from the CEO:
https://twitter.com/lindayacc/status/1683213895463215104
But underneath the rebranding and buzzwords, there was one real new element here - a payments functionality. Essentially, Twitter looks like it wants to create a money transfer app like Venmo that sits within Twitter.
The basic math tells the reason why. Venmo, with about 80 million users, is valued at $38 billion according to one estimate from 2020. Twitter has more than four times that number of users, so if it could replicate Venmo’s revenue per user, it would prove Musk’s plan was a stunning bit of investment.
Of course, it’s easier said than done. There’s no evidence that Twitter can become a payments app or that its users want it to be one. Venmo, Zelle, M-Pesa, direct bank transfers, and other methods exist to compete with it. Users signed up to a social media platform are not immediate converts to a banking app. There are compliance and regulatory obstacles to overcome.
Then again, the basic point remains that the money to be made in fintech, and the head start that Musk has with Twitter’s existing user base, means that it’s an enticing plan. Even if it isn’t working, the potential could lead them to throw more resources and attention at it.
This poses a problem for us in politics. While a fragmented social media landscape poses significant downsides for how we work, the alternative is sticking with a platform that may not even want to be a social media company anymore.