On the takeover of Twitter

So, this past week the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the CEO of the Tesla car company, finally went through. Musk has announced that he plans to reform the rules of Twitter to make it a “free speech” platform. This has naturally caused a lot of disquiet with some fearing that long-banned hate groups, violence inciters and misinformation spreaders who had been banned years ago would make a comeback; this afternoon it was reported that the group Britain First had reappeared on Twitter after having been banned a few years ago. Musk said today that “anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail”, in regard to Jordan Peterson. As a long-term Twitter user, almost since its foundation (I started using it in 2008), I can say that there are people who have bee removed for far lesser and more dubious reasons than Peterson, in at least one case for just being rude (particularly to someone with a blue tick).

I’ve had this blog since 2004. Around 2008 I went on a Muslim panel event in which we discussed the role of the blogosphere in the Muslim community. I can’t remember everyone who was involved, but another participant was Omar Tufail of DeenPort which sadly closed quietly this or last year after having been in decline for some time. I was asked what clouds I thought were on the horizon for blogging and I said that I believed there would be a “blog crunch” in which blogs reliant on free hosting and long-shot business models (free hosting with paid support, for example, a common model for startups at that time) would close as the companies hosting them folded or stopped offering free services. As I found out, the main free host (WordPress) is still very much going, although some of the competitors using their software did fold. I did not foresee the rise of social media, however; it closed quite a few blogs as soon as it appeared, as people preferred to use Facebook in particular, but in recent years I have noticed far less engagement with my blog posts; my hits have dropped considerably as, I believe, people are just not seeing the tweets, especially people who are reading curated feeds.

As the former owners took step after step to make money out of the platform, it became a vastly less enjoyable one as well as a less free one. It was third-party Twitter clients that attracted people to it rather than its clunky early website; around 2010 there were Echofon and Seesmic and others appeared over the next couple of years like Tweetcaster, TweetBot, Twitterific and the open-source Tweetings. Then Twitter started to cripple the clients by imposing subscriber limits, resulting in some clients introducing exorbitant fees or annual subscriptions, and some developers just shutting down their operations. They also lost access to streaming and to statistics. All this was designed to force us to use Twitter’s own apps, which were always greatly inferior but allowed them to put adverts in the feeds and to sneak in ‘curated’ (i.e. censored) feeds. The ‘curation’ is optional but is on by default and the app has been known to switch people back from chronological to ‘curated’ without them requesting it.

Another feature I would like to roll back changes to is blocking. There has always been a block feature, but originally it just meant the person you blocked could not follow or interact with you, but could still read your tweets if they were public. For a while, you could read them while logged out, but in the last few months they have stopped this as well; you now need to log in under another account. This might be justified as an effective way of warding off harassment but the original system protected the blocker from contact while the new system does not prevent anyone who is determined to harass someone; however, many people block not because of harassment but because of simple disagreement or minor annoyance. There are good reasons for wanting to read someone’s feed; they could be part of the same activist circle as you and tweeting things you need to know, they could be a company you did business with who blocked you because you complained, they could be talking about you, and they could be your MP. I know people whose MPs blocked them because they did not like the tone of the criticism they offered. Admittedly, parliamentary rules in any democracy should not allow any MP to block a constituent other than for genuine harassment, and this is beyond Twitter’s or Elon Musk’s power, but nobody should be able to stop someone seeing things they say in public that everyone else can see.

Elon Musk isn’t my ideal owner of Twitter. I was hoping it would be taken over by some wealthy individual or company or other who could run it as a sideline without expecting it to make money, since the decline in the quality of user experience has come as the owners tried to do that. Maybe it should be run by some kind of trust which would keep it free to use and free to speak on, subject to the normal caveats of a civilised society, but that’s not going to happen in the immediate future. The old management wasn’t good, too many people have been kicked off for stupid reasons, and it was stifling creativity and censoring people’s content far more than could be justified as preventing hate or violence. I don’t know if it’s what Musk has in mind but I want the old Twitter back and I want my readers back.

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