57
Percentage
of U.S.
adults who
say they
ever use ...
Percentage of Twitter users and all U.S. adults who have ...
Most popular
Twitter accounts
by number of
followers
Also trending
... BUT ITS USER BASE IS SMALL COMPARED WITH THOSE OF OTHER PLATFORMS
IT IS INFLUENTIAL BECAUSE IT ALLOWS A
FEW ELITES TO SPREAD THEIR NARRATIVES TO
A HIGHLY EDUCATED, WEALTHIER CROWD
81 %
YOUTUBE
21 %
TIKTOK
69 %
FACEBOOK
25 %
SNAPCHAT
23 %
TWITTER
40 %
INSTAGRAM
114 M
@JUSTINBIEBER
109 M
@KATYPERRY
99 M
@CRISTIANO
86 M
@ELONMUSK
132 M
@BARACKOBAMA
106 M
@RIHANNA
Share of all
tweets from
U.S. adult users
created by ... TOP 10% OF TWEETERS BOTTOM 90% OF TWEETERS
HIGH SCHOOLLESS THAN A 4%
EDUCATION
HIGH SCHOOL
DIPLOMA
COLLEGE
DEGREE
LESS THAN
$30,000
IN INCOME
$30,000–
$74,999
$75,000+
10%
23% 30%
33% 36%
32% 41%
54% 59%
31% 42%
0% 25% 50%
80 % 20 %
countries studied, including the U.S.
Six months on, the team behind
that research is continuing its work
on algorithmic bias, amid suggestions
from some conservatives that such
work means meddling with freedom of
speech. Early indications suggest, ac-
cording to Twitter, that the platform’s
boosting of center-right politicians isn’t
an intrinsic quality of its algorithm. In-
stead, researchers found that amplifica-
tion shifts in line with the topics people
care about and changes in how users be-
have. The data is helping the researchers
better understand the algorithmic am-
plification of political content, which
may one day allow the company to in-
tervene as dangerous real-world events
unfold. But doing so would be a political
intervention necessarily based on Twit-
ter’s values. Overnight, those values ap-
pear to have changed from “ facilitating
healthy conversation” to Musk’s self-
professed free-speech “absolutism.”
On Twitter, where discourse is lim-
ited to 280 characters per tweet, nu-
anced discussion isn’t easy—and in
the febrile climate, even Twitter’s own
employees run the risk of becoming
the platform’s dreaded main charac-
ter. Rumman Chowdhury, the leader of
the algorithmic amplification research
team, suggested in a series of tweets that
she was opposed to Musk’s buying the
company. Her comments referenced his
capacity to weaponize Twitter mobs
against critics. “Twitter has a beautiful
culture of hilarious constructive criti-
cism, and I saw that go silent because of
his minions attacking employees,” she
wrote. Soon enough, she muted her no-
tifications on the thread, adding: “the
trolls have descended.” —With reporting
by julia zorthian □
“We have democracy?” elon
Musk interjected, with an impish
smile. He’d just been asked how wor-
ried he was about the state of the
American system of government. “We
have a sort of democracy, I guess,”
Musk went on, balancing his tod-
dler son on his knee at a party mark-
ing his selection as TIME’s Person of
the Year last December. “We have a
two-party system, which generally
means that issues get assigned in a
semi- random manner into one bucket
or the other, and then you’re forced
to pick one bucket. Or like there’s
two punch bowls, and they both have
turds in it, and which one has the least
amount of turds? So I don’t agree with,
necessarily, what either party does.”
The exchange was a revealing one,
both for the answer Musk provided
and the question he avoided. His in-
terviewer, TIME editor-in-chief Ed-
ward Felsenthal, had hoped to engage
him on the concern, widely shared
among political experts, that our de-
mocracy is in danger—that the rule of
law and free, fair elections are under
threat from creeping authoritarianism,
disinformation and institutional dete-
rioration. But Musk seemed to regard
American democracy as merely one
of many temporary, inevitably flawed
political arrangements undertaken in
the course of our ongoing struggle for
human progress.
If he were starting over, Musk vol-
unteered, he might structure things
quite differently. “People have asked
me, say, a Mars society, what are my
recommendations for that,” he mused.
He said he would favor a direct de-
mocracy where the people voted on
issues, with short, simple laws to pre-
vent corruption. Pressed again on the
problems facing the current system,
such as citizens’ ability to access good
information and express their prefer-
ences at the ballot box, he again redi-
rected, suggesting such concerns are
the gripes of congenital pessimists.
VIEWPOINT
WHAT MUSK
BELIEVES
BY MOLLY BALL
PREVIOUS SPREAD: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
