Twitter is dead and Threads is thriving
One year after Elon Musk let that sink in, an elegy for the platform that was — and some notes on the one that is poised to succeed it
Programming note: Platformer will be off Monday to attend an event at the White House, at which we anticipate President Biden will announce an executive order about artificial intelligence. We’ll be back on Tuesday and may have something else cool for you on Friday.
I.
A year ago today, Elon Musk — on the eve of closing his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion — dragged a sink into the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. Today, let’s talk about how the ensuing 12 months reshaped social networks, both in the ways Musk planned and in ones he likely never guessed.
Few events in tech over the past decade have been chronicled as Musk’s Twitter takeover and everything that followed. Most readers here already know too well the stories: the massive layoffs, the disastrous changes to verification, the smearing of former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, the purge of employees perceived as disloyal.
All that happened within the first few weeks. By mid-December, we predicted here that in 2023 “Elon Musk’s continued promotion of right-wing causes and personalities will push away more and more high-profile users, who find themselves increasingly put off by his shock-jock antics and whim-based approach to content moderation.”
And that transpired more or less exactly as written, though it left out the impact of Musk’s equally whim-based approach to software development. Musk temporarily banned critical journalists and stripped the rest of their verification badges; he ordered the development of a system that showed his tweets first; he removed headlines from links and created a system that funded the spread of misinformation. He restored banned users to the platform and sued a nonprofit that accused the company of spreading hate speech.
By July, Twitter was no more, replaced with the confusing jumble of product ideas known as X. The man who Jack Dorsey had singularly entrusted with ensuring the future of the platform had taken just nine months to erase its name from existence.
As we approach the anniversary of the deal closing, the cumulative effect of these changes and others has become clear. Daily users are down about 16 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. Banks that financed the deal are saddled with debt that they will have to sell at a discount, assuming they can sell it at all.
And Musk’s planned pivot to subscriptions flopped at the same time that the company’s advertising business collapsed, Aisha Counts noted at Bloomberg:
The main plank of Musk’s plan for Twitter (now called X) was to shift away from advertising and toward paid subscriptions. A new analysis from independent researcher Travis Brown estimates that 950,000 to 1.2 million people now pay for X’s $8 monthly premium service. That means X persuaded less than 1% of users to sign up — and translates to revenue of less than $120 million annually from the company’s subscription service, not including app store fees from Apple Inc. and Google.
This is hardly a replacement for the ad revenue that Twitter relied on in the pre-Musk era — about $4.5 billion in its last full year as a public company. Meanwhile, many of X’s top advertisers, such as Mondelez International, Coca-Cola, IBM and HBO, are spending less than they were before Musk took over, largely because of policies he’s implemented that have made the service more chaotic and unpredictable. Collectively, X’s top five advertisers are spending 67% less on ads than they did before the acquisition, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Some large ad agencies have said they don’t plan to spend money on X at all.
On Blind, a pseudonymous network for discussing workplaces, current and former employees were asked to vote this week on whether X’s product was better or worse than Twitter’s was a year ago. At press time, 79.4 percent of employees said the product was worse.
II.
By now, most of the former Twitter employees we’ve spoken with have made peace with Twitter’s demise. Musk renaming the company to X proved surprisingly helpful in the grieving process: the move made it clear once and for all that the company they worked for was gone. They have new jobs, or are working on startups, and are occupied with different corporate battles.
But they talk to their old colleagues who remain at X, if they have any. And if they worked on issues related to platform integrity, they worry about how X will fare in the months ahead.
“To the best of my knowledge, except for one individual, everybody I worked with closely is gone,” says Eddie Perez, a former director of product management for civic integrity. “They’re no longer at Twitter.”
Before the takeover, Perez’s team was tasked with detecting efforts to manipulate elections around the world. Together, they added labels to posts containing election disinformation, and annotated content from state-affiliated media. Now, Perez says, much of that work has been abandoned.
“Elon Musk has wadded up in a ball, lit on fire, and thrown out the window the very idea that Twitter or X has a role to play in separating harmful noise from accurate fact,” Perez said.
Having eliminated most of the company’s content moderators, Musk’s X relies heavily on Community Notes, a crowd-sourced fact-checking tool that has proven inadequate against the flood of misinformation shared by paid accounts in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict. “You’re bringing a spitball gun to a lethal fight,” Perez said.
In May, Musk hired former NBC Universal Linda Yaccarino to be CEO, a job formerly held by his dog Floki. Her job was to rescue the company’s moribund advertising business, and in an effort to project a sense of internal momentum she posted a list of the many product changes Musk had instituted since taking over.
“They put up a blog post with dozens of features that they attributed to their pace of innovation, but the vast majority of them were already built,” said Menotti Minutillo, formerly a senior engineering manager on the privacy team.
While some of those projects were shelved because of Twitter’s notoriously impenetrable bureaucracy, others were walked back due to potential harms, he said. Encrypted direct messages arrived after five years of discussion, for example, but they contained numerous security vulnerabilities, and were available only to paid customers.
“Their approach now is ‘Let’s keep flipping switches in the nuclear control room and watching what happens through the glass,’” Minutillo said.
Something else that has noticeably sped up since the acquisition: the ongoing Federal Trade Commission investigation into the company.
Prior to the takeover, as part of its consent decree with the FTC, Twitter’s product development process included detailed privacy and security reviews.
But starting with the relaunch of Twitter Blue last November, according to former chief information security officer Lea Kissner, “the security and privacy review was not conducted in accordance with the company’s process for software development.” Privacy lapses followed. In April tweets posted to Circles, which were supposed to be visible only to accounts specified by the user, began showing up on the public ranked timeline.
Many employees we spoke with expect an eventual reckoning over privacy issues.
“Their mode right now is ‘fuck it, sue me,’” says a former employee who worked on the project. “And you know what? Good luck.”
In the meantime, chaos reigns. As of Thursday, X can now be used to make … audio and video calls.
Also, we’re told, at least one employee who was laid off has been locked out of the company’s internal systems for months, but has continued to collect a paycheck from X ever since.
Twitter might be dead, but that’s the most quintessentially Twitter story we have ever heard.
III.
The death of Twitter revealed, among other things, a large and significantly underestimated demand in the world for a Twitter-like product.
In the early days after the takeover, Mastodon attracted a flood of refugees. In May, Bluesky — built on a decentralized protocol funded by Dorsey and Twitter — entered closed beta and briefly captivated the tech world.
Then, in July, Meta unspooled Threads. A bare-bones Twitter clone that would have been laughed out of the App Store had it arrived even 12 months earlier, Threads tapped into a wellspring of enthusiasm for text-based social networking that surprised even the team at Instagram that built it.
Within a week it had attracted more than 100 million sign-ups and had become, by some measures, the fastest-growing app ever.
Threads also attracted its share of derision. Here was Meta with yet another clone of a successful product, this one filled with try-hard brands cringe-posting about corporate friendship. “It has no purpose,” wrote our friend Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day. “It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time.”
On Wednesday Meta held its quarterly earnings call. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads had “just under” 100 million monthly users, a milestone it (almost) hit despite remaining unavailable in the European Union.
“I’ve thought for a long time there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive,” Zuckerberg told analysts. “I think that if we keep at this for a few more years, then I think we have a good chance of achieving our vision there.”
When Elon Musk walked into Twitter a year ago, he assumed that because the company was broken — wrecked by years of mismanagement and product stagnation — the product must be too.
As the months went on, though, he himself broke the product, in big and small ways. And within an astonishingly short amount of time, one of Musk’s greatest rivals found that to seize the opportunity he didn’t need to give users innovation at all. Zuckerberg only needed to give them Twitter.
Just today, Threads added polls and GIFs — two more features familiar from Twitter. Pinned posts and view counts, two more things you may have first encountered while tweeting, entered testing on Thursday.
Despite Threads’ rapid growth, Meta executives appear keen not to let early success go to their heads.
“We appreciate the vote of confidence, but we have lots more to do and need to be careful not to be too confident,” Instagram and Threads chief Adam Mosseri told us Wednesday in a reply on the app. “I'm hoping we can land support for Europe, early Fediverse progress, better Instagram integrations, and trends in the next few months. It'll be telling to see if these build even more momentum.”
A year ago today, it would be hard to believe that Twitter would be gone within 12 months. Or that anyone — much less Meta — had managed to create and grow a successor to 100 million users.
But never underestimate a team that can move fast and fix things. In the end, Threads became Twitter faster than X could become anything. And while Musk never squared up with Zuckerberg in that cage match, he’s managing to lose the only fight that counted.
On the podcast this week: Kevin and I discuss the states’ lawsuit against Meta over child safety. Then, to celebrate the show’s launch on video, YouTube legend Marques Brownlee joins us to discuss the platform’s evolution and how to succeed there in 2023. And finally, I show Kevin how to use DALL-E 3.
Apple | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon | Google | YouTube (!)
Governing
President Biden is reportedly set to release a sweeping AI executive order that includes requiring advanced AI models to undergo assessments before they can be used by federal workers. We’ll have a report from the scene for you next week. (Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima and Tyler Pager / Washington Post)
OpenAI formed a team to study “catastrophic” AI risks, including nuclear threats. Comforting! (Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch)
Judge Amit Mehta has repeatedly granted Google’s requests to keep the tech giant’s antitrust trial cloaked in secrecy, and press advocates say this erodes the public’s trust in the court system. It does!! (Scott Nover / Slate)
Meta said it would not implement an Oversight Board recommendation to audit its policies around drugs and drug advertising, paving the way for online ketamine dealers to keep buying ads. (Tiffany Kary and Aisha Counts / Bloomberg)
The Internet Watch Foundation warns that AI-generated child sexual abuse material is on the rise, after finding almost 3,000 AI images that broke UK law. Some appear to be based on known victims. (Dan Milmo / The Guardian)
The Frontier Model Forum, an AI standards group made up of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, appointed Chris Meserole from the Brookings Institution to be executive director and said it plans to commit $10 million to an AI safety fund. (Cristina Criddle and Madhumita Murgia / The Financial Times)
Many voiced opposition to an EU legislative proposal that would require real-time scanning of messaging services for CSAM, saying the proposal would break encryption and undermine fundamental democratic freedoms. (Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch)
In its first transparency report, Amazon disclosed that it has over 181 million users and employs over 150,000 people in the EU. (Supantha Mukherjee / Reuters)
The Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine conflicts are demonstrating how social media can be weaponized during wartime, with graphic content and propaganda targeted towards specific audiences. (Drew Harwell / Washington Post)
Kids are attending pro-Palestinian protests on Roblox. One virtual protest area has recorded more than 275,000 visits. (Hayden Field / CNBC)
Paid X accounts are claiming that the Maine mass shootings were a “false flag” and could profit from the claims. (Eric Hananoki / Media Matters)
Industry
Amazon reported that revenue grew 13 percent in the third quarter, easily beating analysts’ expectations. (Annie Palmer / CNBC)
TikTok’s first live global music event, TikTok in The Mix, will feature headliners Cardi B, Niall Horan, Anitta and Charlie Puth. (Rania Aniftos / Billboard)
Apple has reportedly discussed using the Vision Pro for mental health diagnosis by measuring facial expressions. (Wayne Ma / The Information)
Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+ subscriptions are receiving price increases, immediately for new subscribers and in 30 days for existing users. (Joe Rossignol / MacRumors)
Amazon’s third-quarter earnings blew past analysts’ expectations with revenue at $143.1 billion. (Annie Palmer / CNBC)
Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices that forces Apple’s Safari browser to divulge private data including passwords and Gmail message content. (Dan Goodin / Ars Technica)
Ever Googled “food near me”? A number of restaurants are naming their businesses “Thai Food Near Me” or “Barber Shop Near Me” in an attempt to hack SEO. (Mia Sato / The Verge)
Google is rolling out its “About this image” tool to provide context and information about the image’s origin in search. (Jon Porter / The Verge)
Amazon is testing an AI image tool for advertisers that will allow backgrounds and scenes to be created around the ad product to potentially help ad performance. (Chris Welch / The Verge)
China’s biggest gay dating app Blued has plans to expand in Southeast Asia and the US, taking on Grindr, amid increased restrictions on LGBTQIA content and growing competition in its home country. (Viola Zhou and Andrew Deck / Rest of World)
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Great write up.
And all of this happened in just one year. Wow! I mean we all knew it'd be bad but not in my wildest imagination would I've been able to predict any outcome like this.