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SAN FRANCISCO , May 14 (AP) \u2014 A toxic cesspool. A lifeline. A finger on the world\u2019s pulse. Twitter is all these things and more to its over 217 million users around the world \u2014 politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, weirdos and normies, cat and dog lovers and just about anyone else with an internet connection.<\/p>\n
For Elon Musk, its ultimate troll and perhaps most prolific user whose buyout of the company is on increasingly shaky ground, Twitter is a \u201cde facto town square\u201d in dire need of a libertarian makeover.<\/p>\n
Whether and how the takeover will happen, at this stage in the game, is anyone\u2019s guess. On Friday, Musk announced that the deal is \u201con hold,\u201d then tweeted that he was still \u201ccommitted\u201d to it. On Tuesday, the billionaire Tesla CEO said he\u2019d reverse the platform\u2019s ban of former President Donald Trump if his purchase goes through but also voiced support for a new European Union law aimed at protecting social media users from harmful content.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a messy few weeks and only one thing seems sure: the turmoil will continue for Twitter, inside and outside of the company.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwitter at its highest levels has always been chaos. It has always had intrigue and it has always had drama,\u201d says Leslie Miley, a former Twitter engineering manager. \u201cThis,\u201d he says, \u201cis in Twitter\u2019s DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n
From its 2007 debut as a scrappy \u201cmicroblogging service\u201d at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, Twitter has always punched above its weight.<\/p>\n
At a time when its rivals count their users by the billions, it has stayed small, frustrating Wall Street and making it easier for Musk to swoop in with an offer its board could not refuse.<\/p>\n
But Twitter also wields unrivaled influence on news, politics and society thanks to its public nature, its simple, largely text-based interface and its sense of chronological immediacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a potluck of pithy self-expression simmering with whimsy, narcissism, voyeurism, hucksterism, tedium and sometimes useful information,\u201d Associated Press technology writer Michael Liedtke wrote in a 2009 story about the company a few months after it rejected a $500 million buyout from Facebook. Twitter had 27 employees at the time, and its most popular user was Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
Today, the San Francisco icon employs 7,500 people around the world. Obama is still its most popular account holder, followed by pop stars Justin Bieber and Katy Perry (Musk is No. 6). Twitter\u2019s rise to the mainstream can be chronicled through world events, as wars, terror attacks, the Arab Spring, the #metoo movement and other pivotal moments in our collective history played out in real time on the platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwitter often attracts thinkers. People who are thinking about things tend to be attracted to a text-based platform. And it\u2019s full of journalists. So Twitter is both a reflection of and a driver of what people are thinking about,\u201d says writer, editor and OnlyFans creator Cathy Reisenwitz, who\u2019s been on Twitter since 2010 and has over 18,000 followers.<\/p>\n
These days, Reisenwitz tweets about politics, sex work, housing and land use issues among many other things. She finds it great for discovering people and ideas and having others discover her writing and thoughts. That\u2019s why she\u2019s stayed all these years, despite harassment and even death threats she\u2019s received on the platform.<\/p>\n
Twitter users in academia, in niche fields, those with quirky interests, subcultures small and big, grassroots activists, researchers and a host of others flock to the platform. Why? Because at its best, it promises an open, free exchange of facts and ideas, where knowledge is shared, debated and questioned. Journalists, Reisenwitz recalled, were among the first to really take on Twitter en masse and make it what it is today.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I\u2019m on Twitter, (almost) any journalist, no matter how big their platform was, if you said something interesting would respond to you and you could have a conversation about what they\u2019d written and pretty real time,\u201d Reisenwitz says. \u201cAnd I just thought, this is amazing. Just whatever field you\u2019re in, you can talk to the experts and ask them questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
And those subcultures \u2014 they\u2019re formidable. There\u2019s Black Twitter, feminist Twitter, baseball Twitter, Japanese cat Twitter, ER nurse Twitter and so on.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s enabled interest groups, especially those that are organized around social identity, whether we\u2019re talking about gender or sexuality or race, to have really important in-group dialogues,\u201d says Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor at Cornell University who studies social media.<\/p>\n
In a 2018 study on social media subcultures \u2014 Black Twitter, Asian American Twitter and feminist Twitter \u2014 the Knight Foundation found that they not only helped challenge top-down, sometimes problematic views of the communities but also influence wider media coverage on important issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo there\u2019s this really interesting flow of information that\u2019s not just top-down, mainstream media communicating to subcultures, but allowing various groups, in this case Black Twitter, to have really important, impactful conversations that the media took up and got disseminated to the wider public,\u201d Duffy says.<\/p>\n
Software engineer Cher Scarlett says that while Twitter is far from perfect \u2014 and, undeniably, home to harassment, hate speech and misinformation \u2014 it\u2019s still a step above many platforms. That\u2019s because Twitter has at least tried to address toxic content, she says, with improvements like Twitter Safety Mode, a product now being tested that would make it easier for users to stop harassment. Scarlett has faced repeated online abuse for her advocacy for women in the tech field.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been on Twitter since it started. A big part of my network is Twitter,\u201d Scarlett says. \u201cThere is nothing else really like it.\u201d<\/p>\n
THE DARK SIDE<\/p>\n
On the flip side of Twitter\u2019s immediacy, public, open nature and 280-character (once 140-character) limit is a perfect recipe for passions to run high \u2014 especially anger.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen dealing with fans, emotions can get boiling, especially if you are sharing anything negative about their teams,\u201d says Steve Phillips, a former general manager of the New York Mets who now hosts a show on MLB Network Radio. \u201cThe anonymity of Twitter empowers people to take shots sometimes, but it is till one of the most effective ways to communicate with people with similar interests.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not all baseball Twitter out there. There\u2019s also the massive, scary, dark part of Twitter. This is the Twitter of Nazis, of demented trolls, of conspiracy theorists and of nation states funding massive networks to influence elections.<\/p>\n
Jaime Longoria, manager of research and training for the Disinfo Defense League, a nonprofit which works with community organizations to fight misinformation, says Musk\u2019s purchase of Twitter jeopardizes a platform that many experts believe has done a better job of reining in harmful content than its competitors.<\/p>\n
He worries Musk will relax moderation rules that offered some protection against white supremacy, hate speech, threats of violence and harassment. He says he hopes he is wrong. \u201cWe\u2019re watching and waiting,\u201d Longoria says. \u201cThe Twitter we know may be over. I think Twitter as we have known it will cease to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a series of tweets in 2018, then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was committed to \u201ccollective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren\u2019t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Twitter, led by its trust and safety team, has worked to improve things. It enacted new policies, added labels to false information, kicked off repeated violators of its rules against hate, inciting violence and other harmful activities.<\/p>\n
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, social media companies have gone through a reckoning over how Russia used their platforms to influence U.S. politics. In fits and starts, things have started to improve, at least in the United States and Western Europe.<\/p>\n
At its best, Twitter connects people across the world to participate in the open exchange of ideas. Musk told The Associated Press recently that he wants Twitter to be \u201cinclusive\u201d and \u201cwhere ideally most of America is on it and talking.\u201d But this does not take into account the fact that most of Twitter\u2019s user base is outside of the United States \u2014 and that Twitter looks very different in the rest of the world, where American party-line divisions and free speech arguments make little sense.<\/p>\n
Outside Western democracies, for instance, users say not much has changed when it comes to clamping down on hate and misinformation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of hate on Twitter, especially directed at minorities. And so there\u2019s always a constant battle to get Twitter to clamp down on hate speech, very often violent hate speech and fake news. And yeah, I think Twitter really does not really do enough for that,\u201d says Shoaib Daniyal, associate editor with the Indian news website Scroll.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwitter is almost like a central node, which feeds political activity out into TV channels and to journalists and WhatsApp groups.\u201d<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s free speech absolutism, Daniyal says, doesn\u2019t make much sense in India because there have not been many curbs on speech on the platform to begin with.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fairly filled with hate anyway,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd Twitter hasn\u2019t done a lot about it. So let\u2019s see where it goes.\u201d Which, given Musk\u2019s mercurial nature, could be almost any direction at all.<\/p>\n
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