📰 What happens to the news if Musk destroys Twitter?
The new platform owner has mentioned the possibility of bankruptcy in his second week in charge. If Twitter collapsed, where would you get your news?
Last week we were talking about human progress since the Enlightenment and Twitter after a whole week of Musk: he had managed to sack half the company, including the entire human rights team, reduce the blue tick to a paid status symbol and tweet out a conspiracy theory. Some (including me) began to think some kind of major destructive result might be at least a plausible possibility.
In the second week, Musk told everyone to vote Republican the day before the US mid-term elections, tweeted out crude adolescent ad-hominem at Paul Krugman, announced, un-announced and then re-announced a new white-tick “official” badge, created chaos with the new paid blue ticks and the impersonation of corporations and politicians, and saw even more senior executives leave, including those he had been most reliant on in week one.
Then the world’s largest news organisations used the word “bankruptcy” in their headlines about Twitter because that’s what Musk had told remaining staff was a possibility at a meeting. Another of the ideas on the list is reportedly a paywall for everyone. Hundreds of articles have appeared to tell people how to leave Twitter and set up on Mastodon or Substack. Chaos.
Nobody apart from Musk knows what he is doing or why he appears to be executing a series of actions that would fit into a plan to actually destroy the platform. We just need to think about what happens if he does, either by nefarious design or as a result of incompetence and millions of people losing interest as it collapses into another radical right echo chamber full of conspiracies and disinformation like Gab or Tump’s Truth Social.
Until not very long ago, Twitter was the fastest, most accurate source of reporting for latest global news. All you had to do was to follow the right journalists. The latest twists and turns appeared there first because lots of original information was published every day and because reporters tended to tweet before writing their articles or editing their TV-reports.
Compared to the news taking days or weeks to reach readers by horse and rider at the beginning of the Enlightenment, or hours with news wires and broadcast TV in the 20th Century, Twitter and the iPhone meant news from anywhere in the world could be read in any other place in the world with an Internet connection in less than a couple of minutes.
And whether it was for the news or the debate and conflict of ideas, enough people around the world were on it and wanted to be on it to make it work.
Anybody with a phone standing next to an accident or a politician or a crowd or an interesting document could start to report and illustrate a story, and those stories, if they were really important, could move from wherever they happened to be in the world to the front page of the BBC or CNN, and from there on to hundreds of millions of readers more, in about 20 minutes. You could even ask questions to the people directly involved in the stories.
From a historical perspective (remember the slow horses), that is as instantaneous as news has ever been and will likely ever need to be. What would history have been like if people had had iPhones and Twitter and instant information? D-Day, Waterloo, World War One, JFK in Dallas and all the rest.
Already over the past couple of years, certainly since the pandemic, Twitter feels different. It doesn’t flow like it used to, it has slowed down or become more clumsy, and now Musk seems to want to make it worse. I would even say I couldn’t repeat what I did with the Catalan separatist trial in 2019 or the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 on the Twitter of 2022. It wouldn’t be the same.
So instead of fast, mostly accurate, global information straight from your favourite bunch of reporters and sources, any collapse or fragmentation would take us back a few steps, to something slower and more divided or tribal again. You could still try to follow them, but where? Mastodon? Here on Substack? Facebook? Perhaps somebody would invent a better thing one day that once again solves those functional problems for those people interested in news and facts and our shared but ever-changing reality.
I think I would go back to a daily round-up newsletter here on Substack, as well as the daily columns with commentary and context. You would still get the stories I think are relevant to how Spain is changing, just not as instantly, and via email instead of Twitter.