Twitter’s collapse would be a great loss

This weekend, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, shuttered the company’s headquarters and told staff they would have no access until Monday. This has prompted widespread fears that the site is about to be closed down, and many people have been sharing their new social media contacts, in particular Mastodon (my account here), a distributed social media network (meaning there are several servers rather than just one as with Twitter) where whole friendship networks have transferred themselves in the past couple of weeks. There have been suggestions that his takeover and what looks like the impending closure of the site was planned from the beginning; my suspicion is that he is just out of his depth — just as Trump was as president — as if he had intended just to shut it down, he could have done this weeks ago.

But whatever the reasons behind the takeover, its closure would be a disaster. Not just because of friends losing contact with each other; it’s the history that would be lost forever if Twitter were lost. I know people on Twitter who have shared their struggles to help their disabled children get an education, or to get them out of hospitals where they were suffering harm, or get justice for those who have died. There are whole accounts dedicated to live-tweeting the inquests of people who have died while in hospital or otherwise under the care of the state. Perhaps the authors have archived the contents, but I have dowloaded my archive and I cannot find any way of exporting the data once downloaded. Some of this activity has taken place on Facebook as well, but Twitter has been an important platform for bringing people together and raising awareness and coordinating action and a whole record of a decade of activism could be lost because of one rich man’s temper tantrum or because, in Mehdi Hasan’s words, “because one rich man decided he wanted to own the libs”.

The best thing for Twitter would be for it to be run as a not-for-profit so that it can function the best it can for its users, not for its owners. As I said in a previous entry, a lot of functionality that made it both usable and fun has been stripped away since; notably, all the third-party clients have been trashed in favour of an inferior product so that they can bombard us with adverts. That will require people to put up the money and make an offer to buy Musk out, if he will agree. But it goes to show that some things that are worth doing and worth keeping going because they benefit others and enrich their lives are not going to make money.

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