Twitter is Not Dead - But Rigor Mortis is Setting In
Where to flee after my social media motherland has been turned into a digital version of Venezuela?
Last week, Twitter abruptly suspended my account for three days for having “violated spam policy.” Take my word for it. As much as I’d love to blast thousands of fellow Tweeters with ads for “building six-pack abs” or to “date beautiful Slavic women,” I don’t. You’ll find me spamming as much as you’ll find me getting tattooed or knocking on your door to hard-sell you on my religious beliefs. I demanded an explanation and reversal of their decision. I received no response.
Moreover, since Elon Musk assumed ownership, I’ve been plagued, as many others have, by bots and trolls. I have more young comely Chinese women bearing bios with all the substance of flatulence following me and wanting to start a “friendship” than I can shake a mouse at.
The Washington Post just exposed yet another Twitter calamity — the “Erica Marsh” fraud. An attractive young blonde lefty provocateur with 130,000 Twitter followers turned out to be as genuine as a hyper-fast Tesla charging station. “Erica” went poof! after sleuths found zero evidence of her existence. And egg-on-face Twitter belatedly canceled “her” account. This is what happens when you defund the digital police.
Furthermore, after his skirmish with quasi-competitor Substack.com and initially banning links to it, the mercurial Musk somewhat relented. So, writers like myself are now able to post our Substack pieces on Twitter, though not fully. Substack, and perhaps others on the CEO’s fecal roster, is relegated to a detestable apartheid-era “Coloreds Only” status. Allowed entry, but not fully.
With all the standards-enforcers cashiered, all manner of con artists, flimflammers, bunco-schemers, mountebanks and (real) scammers now infest Twitter, romping as freely as ogres in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
In a recent BBC interview, Musk claimed Twitter was seeing record user engagement, and that major advertisers were returning. These claims are flat-out false.
According to the web analytics company Similarweb —
Worldwide visits to twitter.com dropped 7.3% year-over-year in March, the third straight month of declines, according to Similarweb estimates.
Twitter’s unique visitor count on the web dropped 3.3% year-over-year in March.
For the Twitter Android app, average daily active users were down 9.8% in March and monthly active users were down 8%, both year-over-year. Within the US, monthly active users were down 15% on iOS and 14% on Android.
Time on site was down slightly to 10.6 minutes, from 10.7 in March 2022.
Pages per visit were down -1.5% year-over-year (would not necessarily reflect time spent scrolling through the main feed without visiting the distinct URL for a tweet or user profile).
Confirmed quitter account deactivations on the website, which peaked at 1.75 million around the time Musk assumed control of the company in November 2022, have subsided to 1.1 million in March – actually 11% lower than they were a year ago.
Moreover, according to Similarweb, Musk’s assertion that Twitter now commands more than 8 billion minutes of user time per day, which he said is a new record, is also false. Similarweb could find no evidence to support the claim.
Twitter is the Sick Man of the Internet. The term Sick Man of Europe has been used to label nations in serious decline, from Ottoman Turkey to today’s Russia. Failing states are invariably headed by unstable leaders who make crazy decisions and then go into denial and lash out against their critics when things head further south. It becomes a vicious circle eventually leading to utter collapse.
This perfectly describes Mr. Musk’s “leadership” style. After vastly overpaying to acquire Twitter, he then fires most of the staff, including those charged with enforcing standards. Then, he invites the bilge of humanity to the site to firehose the rest of us with everything from QAnon pollution to Donald Trump — who, thank God, has chosen to stick with his galactically successful Truth Social. Musk runs Twitter more like Manuel Noriega would if he were alive, censoring some, throwing in his two cents of conspiracy theories, digitally jailing enemies, etc. Business schools should present his business model and acumen as “a case study in how to kill a successful enterprise.”
The Atlantic writer David Frum lamented, “I'll miss Twitter. I would save it if I could. But out of stupidity or malice or a mix of both, the owners are determined to kill it.”
Many of the people I followed and highly respected have left Twitter. Others are serving notice, including experts on Russia and Ukraine on whom I rely for raw input for my own articles. It’s like being old and seeing your beloved contemporaries pass away. It makes you feel sad and helpless, and focuses your mind on your own imminent departure.
Which confronts me with my own dilemma: Where to flee after my social media motherland of choice has been turned into a digital version of Venezuela, driving perhaps millions of its denizens to risk all and seek refuge in internet lands of the free? Should this commentary result in my being suspended again, or booted altogether, then I’ll have rested my case.
I joined Post.com. And as a Substack writer, I participate intermittently in their Notes. But neither has caught fire. Same goes for Mastodon.com. Many journalists and academics reportedly are flocking to two new platforms: Threads, owned by that other paragon of internet integrity, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, and something called Bluesky.com.
An aside: we desperately need laws to end Gilded Age 2.0 which enables right-libertarian billionaires to flood our democratic system with mega-bucks to distort our politics, buy judges and purchase public media platforms to use as mouthpieces for their crackpot beliefs.
Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon predicts the following for the post-Twitter era:
The question is whether the clear majority migrates to one place or we have 2-3 social media platforms with lots of posting about politics. Also, where elected officials and celebrities go will really matter. If all of Congress starts posting on Threads, journalists will have to be on that platform.
I suspect we end up with 1-2 dominant players in posting about news/politics/culture/sports. I would bet on Twitter (the incumbent) and Threads (part of a massive company.)
Be that as it may, I now know how it feels to experience the decline of one’s homeland — albeit digital — facing having to give up my comfortable existence and friends only to take flight to — where?