56 Time May 9/May 16, 2022
TWITTER, BY
THE NUMBERS
TWITTER’S REACH
AND SATURATION
HAVE GROWN
STEADILY ...
Monetizable
daily active
Twitter
users (4Q)Tweets
sent
each day217 M
500 M
152 M
115 M
2017 ’18 ’19 ’20 2021
0
100M
200M
38 M
IN THE
U.S.
NOTE: MONETIZABLE DAILY ACTIVE USERS ARE THOSE THAT CAN SEE ADS. SOURCES: OMNICORE; STATISTA; PEW RESEARCH CENTER (PLATFORMS 2021,
TWEET PERCENTAGES AND DEMOGRAPHICS 2018)
7 in 10 U.S.
Twitter users say
they get news
on the platformTwitter’s revenue in
2021: $5.1 billion;
net income:
–$221.4 millionespecially poorly for the company’s
anti harassment efforts. “Multiple times,
his followers have been the perpetrators
of targeted harassment, and the use of
his profile has encouraged dogpiling—
which are the exact behaviors we’re try-
ing to limit,” said an employee on the
platform’s health team, which works on
making the site a safer online space for
users. “Since Trump was banned, Musk
has become Twitter’s power user No. 1,”
the person said. The employee, who
was not authorized to speak publicly,
feared a Musk acquisition would at the
very least reduce user trust in Twitter’s
anti-abuse efforts, and at worst could
result in the work being deprioritized
or scrapped.
Members of marginalized commu-
nities—disproportionately the victims
of online abuse—are among those most
protected by Twitter’s current content
moderation. Activists from these com-
munities share Twitter employees’ con-
cerns. “If Elon Musk were to take over,
the damage that would be done would
spread from Twitter workers not being
able to implement the things they need
in order to keep the platform safe,”
Jelani Drew-Davi, a campaign manager
at the digital civil rights group Kairos,
told TIME in the days before the deal.
As an example of Musk’s record, Drew-
Davi cited a lawsuit alleging a culture
of rampant racist abuse toward Black
workers in a Tesla factory.
Since the explosion of social media
over a decade ago, researchers have
found that sites that privilege free
speech above all else tend to become
spaces where civic discourse is drowned
out by harassment, restricting participa-
tion to a privileged few.
That finding has informed Twitter’s
recent work. While the company does
remove tweets and ban accounts of se-
vere offenders, it focuses more on nudg-
ing users to be kinder. A stated priority is
facilitating “safe, inclusive, and authen-
tic conversations.” It has also pledged
to “minimize the distribution and reach
of harmful or misleading information,
especially when its intent is to disrupt
a civic process or cause offline harm.”
In cases where tweets are found to be
bad for civic discourse but not illegal—
like misinformation or insults —tweets
often aren’t deleted but removed from
recommendation algorithms, meaning
that Twitter doesn’t boost them to users
who do not follow their author. It is un-
clear whether these priorities will con-
tinue under Musk.
“In a way, [Musk’s] goals are aligned
with ours in that we are certainly inter-
ested in protecting democracy,” says the
Twitter employee on the health team.
“But the idea of bringing more free
speech to the platform exposes his na-
iveté with respect to the nuts and bolts.
A lot of platforms [have been] founded
on this free-speech principle, but the re-
ality is that either they become a cess-
pool that people don’t want to use, or
they realize that there is actually the
need for some level of moderation.”
Business analysts point out that con-
tent moderation is good for profits too.
Without it, Twitter “would be swamped
by spam, porn, antivaccination misin-
formation, QAnon conspiracies, and
fraudulent campaigns,” said Paul Bar-
rett, deputy director of the NYU Stern’s
Center for Business and Human Rights,
in a statement. “That’s not a business
that most social media users or advertis-
ers would want to associate with.”
Musk’s takeover deal took several
twists and turns, as Twitter’s board of
directors seemed reticent, adopting a
strategy known as a “poison pill” to ward
off a takeover. From the start, Musk cast
his quest as flying in the face of intran-
sigent Silicon Valley elites, often align-
ing with GOP talking points that con-
servatives are being unfairly censored
online and—in a move that could open
the door for former President Donald
Trump’s return to the platform—has
said he would prefer “time-outs” for
users who break the site’s rules, rather
than permanent bans. (Twitter banned
Trump permanently after Jan. 6, 2021,for incitement to violence during his at-
tempt to undemocratically overturn the
results of the 2020 election.)Alongside vAgue commitments to
add an edit button and get rid of spam,
Musk’s most substantial call has been for
Twitter to be more transparent about its
algorithm’s decisionmaking. But Twitter
is already among the most transparent of
all social networks in terms of research-
ing its own flaws and sharing the results.
That research suggests, in practice,
more conservative views may have ben-
efited most from Twitter’s algorithm.
Last October, Twitter found that, in
the run-up to the 2020 election in the
U.S., right-wing partisan news sources
received a greater boost from its algo-
rithm than moderate or left-leaning
news sources. It also found a similar ef-
fect for politicians in six out of the seven