I picked a bad week to have my Twitter account hacked
After having my Twitter account hacked a week ago, I've come to realize that I'm in agreement with Elon Musk on a single point: Twitter, the professional networking platform of choice in elite media and journalism, and the de facto site of political and celebrity news and increasingly, foreign policy crises, is built on chewing gum.
I haven’t heard back from Twitter in response to my several requests to restore control of my account in the week since my account was hacked, and given that half of the company was laid off two days after my account was hacked, I don't expect I ever will. (I also reached out to Twitter with a request for comment before writing this and didn’t hear back.)
I suppose I could use this moment to reassess my relationship with Twitter and how I choose to spend my time and doing so was definitely a very productive several minutes. Then, I created @bendwalshreal and got back online. So, smash that subscribe button, etc.
Fun little aside: When I created my new account, the top suggestion on the automated, Twitter-generated list of accounts to follow was Elon Musk, followed by Matt Yglesias, a former member of the Backstreet Boys and the President of the United States. Simply as an exercise in buying followers, you have to respect Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
But the most important thing to say about Twitter now is this: Musk has no idea what he is doing.
There is an entire cottage industry of Silicon Valley personalities attempting to construct some coherent strategy behind the deal and they're all failing.
One way to tell that Musk doesn't, deep down, have a genius plan for Twitter is that he really did not actually want to buy Twitter. He started this whole thing as a kind of needy maybe joke/maybe not joke, then signed a binding contract, then tried to back out and his bit landed him in Delaware Chancery court, pleading to be allowed to prove that the company he'd agreed to pay $44 billion for was a teeming wasteland of spam accounts.
Musk is indeed a very different kind of CEO for Twitter, because unlike its previous leaders, he seems to really love using it. More importantly, he thinks like someone who really loves using Twitter: being on Twitter defines how he thinks. Which is to say, he thinks about the kinds of fights and grievances and annoyances that someone who uses Twitter thinks about: everything from the centrality of Twitter as a neo-public square to making it easier to see the reply tweets of celebrities who have replied to other celebrities tweets.
The big problem for Twitter, the business, is that statistically speaking, being a power Twitter user is a freakish statistical anomaly.
Technically, there are 238 million daily active Twitter users. But less than 10% of users produce 90% of tweets and "cryptocurrency and 'not safe for work' (NSFW) content…ae the highest-growing topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users," Reuters recently reported that a recent internal company report found. The company's definition of a "heavy tweeter" – "someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week" – illustrates how few people use Twitter in the addictive, consuming way that reporters, politicians, celebrities and Elon Musk do.
What people who are really on Twitter cannot fully internalize is the fact that everyone else experiences Twitter off of Twitter. They see embedded tweets in a People Magazine story, they see screenshotted tweets somewhere, they read CNN or NYT stories about people talking about tweets. It’s a media twitter cliche to complain about the inelegance of the phrase “took to twitter,” but it really is a useful. Almost everyone who interacts with Twitter does so by hearing about people who took to twitter.
In other words, Twitter is the PRNewswire of the social media age. Not all news is made on Twitter, but a certain kind of news is made almost exclusively on Twitter. If you’re a company announcing a deal, head over to PRNewswire and instantly, your press release is on the Bloomberg terminal and dozens of newswires. PRNewswire is so effective at getting information where it needs to be that it is an SEC approved method of corporate disclosure. If you’re a celebrity and your PR team has fired up a notes app apology for you, it’s time to take to Twitter.
That’s something of value, but just how much value is Musk’s problem: the company that owns PRNewswire was taken private in 2020 for $2.7 billion.