New York Magazine - USA (2021-02-01)

february1–14, 2021 | newyork 15

A little over a year ago, I joined a chorus
admonishing the company. “Algorithms
that promote conspiracies and junk sci-
ence, and inconsistent application of your
terms of service, have resulted in a firm
that not only underperforms, but is dan-
gerous,” I wrote in a public letter to the
board. “The poor citizenship of Twitter is
bad. What’s worse is Twitter’s malfeasance
coupled with scant benefit to stakehold-
ers.” Despite the fact I owned $10 million
of the stock, the company didn’t even
respond, let alone act on the advice. So let
me put it a little more plainly.
Trafficking in misinformation is wrong.
Trafficking in misinformation with a
structurally unsound business model is
wrong and futile. But there’s an upside
here: Twitter’s financial weakness is what
gives it a chance for redemption.

setting aside the company’s poor finan-
cial performance, and ignoring the threat to
democracy that it poses, Twitter can boast
some extraordinary successes. The platform
is an essential element of the media and en-
tertainment spheres, both the nervous sys-
tem of pop culture and a pop-culture phe-
nomenon itself, with 187 million daily active
users. But it has never turned that engage-
ment into a strong business.
For a time, Donald Trump’s prolific use of
Twitter distracted investors from the com-
pany’s feeble business model. During his
tenure as president, Trump tweeted more
than 26,000 times and was tagged as often
as 1,000 times per minute. The unprece-
dented activity reversed a slide in Twitter’s
stock—but, tellingly, in the days after he was
kicked off the platform, the company’s mar-
ket cap shrank by $5 billion.
For Twitter, Trump was—as he has been
in politics—the loudest and most promi-
nent example of a broader trend. For
years, the company has been fostering the
forces of disinformation and division. A
2018 MIT study co-authored by the com-
pany’s own former chief media scientist
found that false news stories on Twitter
are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted
than true stories and spread across the
network at least six times faster. We wit-
nessed the real-world cost of this on Janu-
ary 6, when thousands of deeply misin-
formed Americans stormed the U.S.
Capitol—an insurrection that was, in part,
motivated by and organized on Twitter. As
a general corporate principle, you don’t
want to have to list “We occasionally act as
a handmaid to sedition” in the risk-factors
section of your Form 10-K.
For years, Jack Dorsey and Twitter’s
other top executives have been looking the
other way. Numerous external researchers

havemappedthespreadofgarbage on

Twitter, and they reach a consistent

conclusion:Atiny numberofsources

accountfornearlyallofthecontentgener-

atedontheplatform.Onestudyfoundthat

just 20 accounts(including@realDon-

aldTrump)wereresponsibleforone-fifth

ofallfalseclaimsmadeaboutvotingdur-

ing a portion of 2020. Another found that

just 24 external websites received 79 per-

cent of links promoting fake news and con-

spiracy theories. Banning the leading

sources of junk is an obvious move and

wouldbeat least partiallyeffective—one

group of researchers calculated that online

misinformation about election fraud fell

73 percent after Trump was banned.

With few exceptions, Twitter has

refused to do this. The company has put

resources into improving its bot-detection

and content-moderation tools over the

years, but the periodic PR announce-

ments about suppressing large numbers

of minor accounts (which are quickly

replaced) have served only to obscure the

truth: Twitter has let larger and more

destructive accounts run amok because

the company depends on the content and

engagement these accounts generate. The

real issue is Twitter’s ad-based revenue

model, which both is corrosive to the com-

monwealth and makes the company

worth less money.

Because the current model prioritizes

time on the platform at all costs, it pro-

duces an algorithm that amplifies enrage-

ment and polarization. Anyone who has

been on Twitter will recognize the compul-

sion to refresh the page just one more time

and get that dopamine hit, hate-reading

our enemies and enjoying the glorious

dunks of everyone else. The algorithm

knows it too, and it learns from our every

tap and dials up the doom.

Even if an ad-based model did not pro-

duce this digital exhaust, it would still be

destined to fail by Twitter’s insufficient

scale. The company’s reach is large com-

paredtotraditionalmedia’s butdwarfed

bythat ofGoogleandFacebook,which

dominatedigitaladvertising.Chokingon

thedust ofa duopolyis a difficultposition

fromwhichtobuilda business.

It ’s notimpossible toselladsinthe

shadowofGoogleandFacebook—infact,

therearecompaniesmuchsmallerthan

Twitter that are prospering. Snap’s disap-

pearing messages favor the personal over

the viral, and the company is valued at

nearly twice what Twitter is despite signifi-

cantly smaller sales. Pinterest builds audi-

enceswithinnicheslike food,fashion, and

crafts, aligning users around sources of joy,

not rage. It commands a value similar to

Twitter on less than half the revenue. Nei-

ther Snap nor Pinterest is free of issues, but

to date, nobody has rallied a mob to attack

the U.S. Capitol using tastefully curated

photos of bathroom remodelings.

Twitter is fundamentally a generalist

platform, however, and will have to be

proactive to move its users toward non-

destructive behavior. Building a profitable

business that doesn’t spew social harm

will require rethinking the basics.

facebook and google (which owns

YouTube) are in many ways far worse than

Twitter. But they are vastly more profit-

able—they each make more profit in a

single quarter than Twitter makes in rev-

enue in an entire year. Thus the cost of

cleaning up their act is higher, and the

ruthlessly capitalist argument for doing so

is more difficult to make. But Twitter’s in-

ability to turn its extraordinary reach into

extraordinary revenue means it can afford

to change the way it does business. It

doesn’t have that much to lose.

At the same time, I believe Twitter has

quite a bit to gain. That’s why I’m still a

shareholder (and will likely buy more),

even while I’m writing an article detailing

so many of the things I think are wrong

with it. Twitter is already a landmark com-

pany culturally, and with some robust

Twitter’s inability to produce big

profits means it can afford

to change its model. It just doesn’t

have that much to lose.