Achi news desk-
If anything is emblematic of Twitter’s demise, it’s the rise and stand of Oprah Winfrey’s account.
Oprah joined the platform in 2009, tweet for the first time live from her hugely popular TV show: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. REALLY FEELS THE 21ST CENTURY.”
It was a “breakthrough moment” for the platform, said Axel Bruns, a professor at the digital media research center at the Queensland University of Technology.
“That was really the moment when the numbers really took off.”
These days, Oprah still has an account on the now renamed X, with 41.7m followers. But since November 2022, a month after Elon Musk finally acquired the site, she has posted just once – in January 2023, when he told Chelsea Clinton that she was “still laughing really loud 
” over Clinton accidentally wearing two different black shoes to an event.
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Controversy about X has reignited in the past week, as the Australian government took the platform to court in an effort to get it to take a video of a Sydney bishop being stabbed while officiating a church service last week .
X says he complied with orders to take pictures of the stabbing (although ironically, the post announcing his compliance had a comment directly below it where someone had shared the full video and graphics) and Musk has been scathing about Australian requests for the film to be broadcast. be taken down. X has been contacted for comment.
But as the debate rages over what responsibility social media platforms have for preventing the spread of violent or extremist content, another question has emerged: what is Twitter/X even anymore?
What has come into existence of a site that was once absolutely indispensable to the news cycle and political debate and is now increasingly being abandoned by those who once checked it religiously?
The beginning: a ‘utopian vision’
In the early years of Twitter, he had lofty goals, says a former employee at Twitter Australia, who does not wish to be named.
“I think back then it was definitely a utopian vision. Like so many of these founders, they really saw themselves as disruptive, as creating a space for real public discussion,” he said. “I think people really enjoyed it back then – it was an innovative platform that moved very quickly, you could get the latest news, you could follow and connect with people you admired” n big It always had pockets of being a toxic swamp, even early on, but it wasn’t like that.”
“It had a social cachet,” she said. “Remember when everyone was obsessed with having a blue tick … and people who didn’t have one pretended they didn’t care?”
The exact number of monthly active users is not available, but while Twitter / X has never had the broad mainstream appeal of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok, for years it has had a huge impact on the world of news and politics.
“It’s a very specific and limited audience,” says Bruns. “But the kind of audience you could reach on Twitter were journalists, politicians, activists, experts of various forms… often the people who are influential in other online and offline communities.”
Belinda Barnet, senior lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, says: “It became a company that made itself right at the center of the news cycle. In essence, it became a tool that journalists in particular could not afford to do without.”
This was partly because Twitter’s functionality – specifically @ mentions and hashtags – was so well-made for breaking news.
In Japan, for example, Twitter became big in part because in 2011, when the country was hit by the devastating tsunami, people used it as a way to communicate and organize, said a former Twitter employee.
“It became a real lifeline for people, that was the way people were saved,” he said.
Pew research from 2021 found that 69% of US Twitter users said they got news from the site, 46% said the site increased their understanding of current events and 30% said it made them feel ‘ n more politically involved.
The breaking news function was not without its problems. While the immediacy of the platform gave voices to dissidents and citizen journalists, making it essential for uprisings like those seen in the Arab spring, it also allowed politicians to bypass the traditional mediation of journalists, Bruns said.
“There are quite a few politicians who basically stopped giving interviews to journalists, because then they also have to expose themselves to critical questions, and basically just post their announcements on Twitter.”
There have always been problems with misinformation and trolling, Barnet says, but the company has adopted measures to try to combat some of the worst effects, by implementing what she calls “three pillars”: user authentication blue tick, moderation policies and trust and security team.
“All these things worked together to make it fairly reliable during a breaking news event, and that’s why people went there. Misinformation went viral on the old Twitter, but they often killed the trend before it got anywhere,” he said.
The present: Musk’s wild west
All three of these pillars were quickly dismantled after Musk acquired the platform in late 2022, Barnet said.
The trust and security teams were among those fired by Musk in the frantic weeks after he acquired the company for US$44bn and walked into the headquarters on his first day holding a ceramic sink. A video of Musk’s entrance was posted to the site with the caption: “Let that sink in”.
The accounts of many of those who had been blocked from the site for violating its online rules, including Donald Trump, were restored (although Trump’s account was later blocked again).
The authentication process changed dramatically. Instead of people getting blue ticks because they were a public figure or worked for a recognized news site, ticks were now available to buy.
The method of standardization also changed. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as the basis of free speech.
“They are very reluctant to engage in any kind of moderation,” Bruns said. “To some extent that represents a broader sense in the United States about freedom of speech being an absolute good above all else. While other places in Australia and Europe and many other places are concerned with the need to balance the rights of freedom of speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And to a lot of otherwise pretty liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, basically. “
Ironically, X has suspended the accounts of people who have criticized Musk, including the accounts of several high-profile journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post who had been critical of him in 2022. At the same time, he banned an track the location of his own personal jet using publicly available data.
“Elon wants it both ways,” Barnet said. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was true, absolutely essential to the news cycle”, but also to “the disk of the pillars, the processes that Twitter had worked out over years and years are favorable to a community who can find facts.”
“I think it’s becoming a toxic mess,” Barnet said.
The future: a place that cannot be controlled
Research by Pew found that in the first few months after the acquisition of Musk’s Twitter, 60% of US Twitter users took a break of a few weeks or more from the platform. A quarter of those questioned said they did not see themselves using the site at all within a year.
Even the most prolific tweeters were using the platform less, with a 25% drop in the number of tweets they post each month.
Whether the trend has continued is a more difficult question to answer, in part because under Musk, it has become too expensive for researchers studying social media to continue their work.
For several years, Twitter has made application programming interfaces (APIs) available to academic researchers and private sector organizations for a price. About a year ago, the cost to access these APIs had skyrocketed.
Aaron Smith, director of data labs at Pew, says his center has developed a “fairly rich body of work” on Twitter over a number of years, but since the prices for accessing tweets have increased – he says the annual fee to access the API is now “more than our team’s entire research budget for a couple of years” – they haven’t been able to do more research about the platform.
Bruns says academics are in the same boat. “You cannot do any particularly exploratory research, search for hate speech bots or misinformation on the platform. Basically, [X] pretty much priced themselves out of the market.”
He says this is a shame, as academic research on Twitter has been used to enable the platform to identify and clean up pockets of hate speech and misinformation, which will now go even more unchecked.
“It’s certainly already started to transform into something more like … platforms like Gab or Parler, or even [Trump’s] Truth Social where you have far, far right people wildly agreeing with each other and furiously hating everyone else.”
Even the former employee has since deactivated her account. “I think what it is now is a very dangerous space, it’s uncontrolled,” he said.
“I miss it sometimes. I always thought it was an amazing news wire for journalists and citizen journalists … I don’t know, I find myself sitting with the latest news and wondering where to go. There is a hole that has been left behind. I hope someone tries to fill that gap.”
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