To the outside world, the former Twitter (now X) might look like it’s in decline. To its owner, it looks perfect.
Is Twitter back? At The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel argues that while Twitter, now X, is a “rat’s nest of reckless speculation, angry partisans, and toxicity,” it’s also “alive in a way that’s hard to quantify,” after weeks of major breaking-news events. The platform’s pull for elites is awkward, he notes: News of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race was first shared and consumed on a service owned by a guy who has endorsed Trump and reportedly intends to support him financially. Casey Newton of Platformer disagrees. Threads is ascendant, he says. Meanwhile, X is the “sunk-cost social network,” occasionally flashing back into relevance due to the old reflexes of a political class with “no interest in mastering a new platform.” At Business Insider, Hasan Chowdhury says recent events have “reinforced” the case for X as the “internet’s digital town square,” while Peter Kafka notes that, despite its genuine stickiness for some users, its business is still a complete wreck.
X is where history happens https://t.co/cUDWVWkpsq
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) July 21, 2024
Everyone’s a little bit right here. X remains the de facto breaking-news platform, the liveliest place to attempt to keep up with real-time events as they happen. This is less of a virtue or a clear source of value than a description of what makes the platform addictive. But that was the case before Elon Musk bought the platform, too. Influential networks in various industries and affinity groups are still present, to different degrees, on X, and new ones are still forming: It has a large influence over the public discourse around AI, for example.
Still, X is smaller, and the various established communities held together by users who aren’t inclined to pay for the privilege of posting are losing energy, reach, and audience. Meta’s Threads, as Newton points out, is, despite Meta’s insistence that it not be overwhelmed by politics, growing and becoming more useful for following current events. But it remains an incredibly strange place, where aggressive user recruitment from other Meta properties combines with opaque algorithmic recommendations to create a frequently uncanny and disorienting experience — less a network of savvy, in-the-know posters than an Instagram comment section without context. Politically speaking, over the last few weeks, Threads was the best place to read furious posts from liberals about how cable-news hosts and New York Times reporters haven’t been supportive enough of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden in particular, which meets a real demand but doesn’t make the strongest case for the platform’s centrality in American life. Bluesky has been open to the general public since February but still feels like a niche forum. Facebook is in its slop era. As it awaits execution, TikTok remains influential in a way that barely overlaps with X at all.
Musk’s platform still has some juice, but it’s also a very different place. Let’s say you’d drifted away from the platform and recently checked back in. The quickest way to grasp how it’s changed is to look at the primary interface, which helpfully juxtaposes the service’s future with its past. On the left is the algorithmic “For You” feed, which X made the default for users back in early 2023.
Doubling down on automated recommendations was, in hindsight, an understandable play for engagement on a platform that had stagnated before Musk’s purchase. But it was also a risk. This feed is full of bait, viral images and videos clipped from other platforms. If you’ve shown any interest in news, it’s full of that, too, except the posts are old — sometimes days old — making it fairly useless for following real-time events. Like algorithmic feeds on other platforms, it’s responsive to what you give it; if you show interest in an account or subject, you can expect to be shown more of it. But it’s also full of people that you never elected to see — people you might be aware of but declined to follow.
This feed can be quite engaging — it’s clearly sorting users into demographic and interest-based buckets and serving them popular content they’re likely to look at — but it also makes neo-X a largely undifferentiated product, a relative minnow among algorithmic video giants. I don’t mean to suggest that the pre-Musk Twitter proposition — here, doomscroll for a few hours in a “social” environment with such low engagement that it makes you feel alone on the internet — was great. But it was, at least, unique. X’s “For You” feed is a second-rate time-wasting toy tacked onto a slowing real-time feed. (It’s also a vector through which the platform’s political reorientation confronts users across the political spectrum, as some of the most viral content on the platform emanates from the galaxy of accounts clustered around Musk himself.)
On TikTok, individualized content recommendation tends to make the platform feel even larger than it is. On X, however, it does the opposite, failing to conceal and sometimes emphasizing how narrow and small the app is becoming. Engagement-baiting blue-check accounts get surfaced constantly across a wide range of feeds. Share a funny TikTok from the “For You” page with some friends and there’s still a good chance they haven’t seen it; try the same with people who still log into X and you start to get the sense that the platform’s recommendation algorithms just don’t have that much to work with. It’s a narrower, shallower service — less an organic source of new content than an aggregator with some “best of” feeds.
Next to the “For You” tab is users’ “Following” feed, which represents the other half of Musk-era X: a throwback chronological layout containing posts from people you’ve actually followed in the order they’ve been posted. To the extent X still works as a news platform, this is why, but like its algorithmic counterpart, it doesn’t tell a particularly flattering story. Longtime users are posting less because they have less to gain — unless you pay to get a blue check mark, post visibility approaches zero — and newer users, particularly those hoping to make money from X’s new revenue-sharing program, know they’re posting with algorithmic promotion in mind. The people and organizations that felt compelled to contribute to Twitter’s common real-time feed in years past are finding less reason to do so; as Newton suggests, those who are still there are often posting out of inertia.
So yes: Twitter is back, but also dying; the new X is ascendant, and its conjoined twin isn’t doing so well. By previous and general social-media standards, this isn’t a great story. Nor are things going particularly according to the plan laid out after the acquisition: This is, if anything, further from an “Everything App” than it was before. It is politically shifted but no more diverse, and it is less plausible as the sort of place you might make payments, date, find jobs, or communicate privately and securely. In contrast, if you’re drawn to the platform in more purely ideological terms, you’re probably pretty happy with how things are going and see X as righting the wrongs of Twitter — as a politically corrected, or purged, version of a service so hopelessly captured by dark forces that it had to be saved by a crusading billionaire.
If, in other words, you see things like Elon Musk. For Musk, X has a lot of really great features — it always did, and now it has more. It’s a place where you can exert political influence not just with your messages, but with your choices about what to boost or censor. It’s a place where you can promote your companies, millions of people will listen, and thousands of fans will leap to your defense. It’s a place where your jokes are all funny, your ideas are all great, and your enemies are all part of a conspiracy. More specifically, it’s a place where you make the rules. Twitter was a place where executives expressing political opinions was evidence of a conspiracy; X is a place where the owner’s political endorsements are a heroic necessity. Twitter was a place where lack of advertising was evidence of a bad product; X is a place where advertisers who refuse to spend money on the platform are righteously sued.
Eighty gloriously unhinged seconds in which Jordan Peterson tries to sell Elon Musk on "the carnivore diet" pic.twitter.com/heTCKNEfX1
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) July 23, 2024
Some of X’s new features are more personal in nature: On Twitter, misgendering trans people was against the community guidelines; X is a platform where “cisgender” is considered a slur and Musk is free to misgender and deadname his own trans child in a gruesome live interview conducted through a partnered friendly media outlet by a profoundly unwell Jordan Peterson in front of millions of people. It’s truly everything that its most important customer has always wanted, exactly as he saw it in his head: the Cybertruck of social platforms, a tool for vengeance, and the only way to fight the “woke mind virus” that “killed” his daughter. The question of whether Twitter is generally over is interesting but weirdly irrelevant — as assessed by its owner, it couldn’t be more back.
