A “follower’s guide” to Twitter - why it may matter in the #covid19 era

Disclaimer: Not sure what possessed me to write what might be construed as a promotion message for Twitter. It seems covid-19 is having strange effects on me. I should say though up front that, as I write this, I do not own Twitter stock and do not have any commercial interests in Twitter. On the contrary, I have a bit of a problem with social networks as you will see below. In any case these following thoughts are my own.

My idea here is to try to explain how to get useful information out of Twitter, in other words, how to use it as a consumer of information, a lowly “follower”. This is not about how to reach large audiences and conquer the world by posting brilliant thoughts. In other words, it is not about how to become an “influencer” on Twitter. The target audience is people who do not use Twitter, including maybe those who signed up to Twitter at some point and got completely perplexed and demotivated thinking “it is not for them”.

Social Networks are good and terrible

Let me start by saying that I used to be a pretty heavy Facebook user, but I have been mostly off it for a long time now. I do not use Instagram at all. I use LinkedIn mostly professionally and Twitter as a significant source of news and for exploration of interests. I have ambivalent views on social networks. On one hand, I love the concept of virtually connecting people. I have lived in three different countries and have friends spread all around the world. Social networks make “keeping in touch” with friends, as well as past and current colleagues and acquaintances, both practical and at times rather rewarding. I do miss this aspect of Facebook. I am, however, disturbed by, and completely at odds with, the business model used by social networks. The advertising-based, freemium model is de-ranging our society in so many ways, but I digress as this is not the purpose of this writing. I would encourage people to read Jaron Lanier’s book on the subject: “Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”. Read more of his books if you can, they are brilliant …and no you will not find him on social media much!

Real time access to opinions and information that matter

Despite all that, with the advent of covid-19, I find Twitter invaluable as a source of information. Ben Thompson has been commenting on this recently on his very insightful stratechery blog: https://stratechery.com/2020/zero-trust-information/, where he gives a recent example of Twitter’s value:

“Once we get through this crisis, it will be worth keeping in mind the story of Twitter and the heroic Seattle Flu Study team: what stopped them from doing critical research was too much centralization of authority and bureaucratic decision-making; what ultimately made their research materially accelerate the response of individuals and companies all over the country was first their bravery and sense of duty, and secondly the fact that on the Internet anyone can publish anything.”

If you are not familiar with the story you can read the background in the link above but suffice it to say, Twitter enabled Seattle Flu Study team to bypass bureaucrats and make their findings known to the wider public via Twitter, many of which acted on the information faster than the official recommendations, potentially accelerating the official measures, possibly with significant positive effects.

On a more personal note, during early stages of covid19 crisis (still March 2020 at time of writing), I found information posted by people like Nicholas Christakis and Tomas Pueyo as well as by, my favorite person with anger management problems, Nassim Nicholas Taleb particularly valuable. These are just some of the very many examples I could provide. I suggest you look at their backgrounds, and their recent tweets, if you are not already familiar with them, to get a sense of what they are all about. Note that it does not matter, whether you personally find them interesting or worth following, nor am I trying to tell you who to follow.

Instead, consider this: My social network (in terms of friends and acquaintances) does not come anywhere near these people and thus my natural network would not allow me access to them. But Twitter allows me direct access to their thoughts, and the thoughts, questions, investigations, and answers of many others like them! Not just to their curated opinions found in books, magazines, and journals, but to their direct thoughts as they express them real time.

To turn it around, the ability of “experts”, or more generally people of note (whoever this is for you) in any field, to exchange ideas and to provide in depth information, in real time to events that matter, is phenomenal, and what I find most valuable.

The point I am trying to make is this. Twitter gives you access to a vast array of time critical information not easily available through other sources. The Twitter format, short messages, which can be stitched together into longer “threads”, allows you to get a sense of many perspectives from many sources incredibly quickly. This is much harder to achieve via other media sources who use longer format (by nature) and are curated/centralized (by design). You can supercharge this aspect of twitter by using something like Tweetdeck, which allows you to monitor multiple subject/account feeds in addition to your main feed. So, this way you get not just headlines, but also snippets of opinion hopefully from people whose opinions matter to you. At the same time active links to documents, articles, podcasts, and videos allow you to dive deeper into anything that catches your attention. Most often in fact, Twitter is not where you find the valuable information. Instead, it is where you find the pointer to the webpage, book, podcast, youtube, or whatever destination, where the valuable information resides. You still need to go there and read/watch/listen to the detail information to get real value.

How and where to find value

It is not an accident Twitter has been popular with financiers and political pundits for long time, as time-critical information from relevant “experts” matters a lot in these areas. I believe that, for any event like covid-19, where the impact is wide and the subject matter requires domain expertise, more people could benefit from it. It is a bit strange to me that Twitter has maxed out at just over 300mil users vs Facebook’s 2.5B users and growing (stats from Statista.com). Trust me, there are cute cat videos on Twitter also! But yes, I know there are many other reasons for Twitter’s lack of growth, including various management blunders over the years and a part-time CEO, but that’s yet another discussion.

From user perspective, one challenge with Twitter, and I suspect one cause for the smaller user base, is the significant on-ramp before you start getting any value out of it. Even then, you mostly follow strangers, so the emotional connection of Facebook is not quite there for a lot of people.

What I want to do next is to provide some thoughts on how to go about entering the world of Twitter, as a user/follower, looking to take advantage of this information medium, without getting completely lost.

Twitter works differently than other social networks, in that you just “follow” who you are interested in following, without them having to explicitly “accept” you as a friend. They can still block you if you piss them off with your comments though, so be nice, or rather be nice regardless, because you are a decent person.

This “follow” feature is also available in Facebook and other networks these days, but Twitter was built like this from scratch and this is the main mechanism for creating your network. This means that you chose who to see information from and you have access to information coming from complete strangers. The problem then is how to “curate” your own feed.

Now, to be clear, Twitter is hostage to the same advertising-based business model Facebook and others are using; Twitter is just bad at it in comparison. Nevertheless, the implication is that your “feed” (what a horrible word!) is controlled by Twitter’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to maximize your engagement via behavioral modification (refer to Lanier’s book above for more), for the purpose of pushing more ads to you (aka ”promoted Tweets”). So, you do not fully control your feed by any means. The contents of the feed, however, are primarily drawn from the posts of the people you follow, as well as what other postings they like, re-tweet, and comment on. You can also use hashtags (#) to manipulate the feed by topic. Hashtags are an important tool, and Twitter is expanding their use to make it easier to also search by subject matter, but I will set that aside for now.

In any case, if you follow just a few random people, the feed feels impersonal as it is driven by general news and “what is trending”. This is likely underwhelming and undifferentiated from any other news source, albeit more disorganized than most.

The way to get something better than this is obviously to start following interesting people. There are many ways to calibrate this. You can of course follow your friends and colleagues if any of them post on Twitter. But for a lot of people this will be useless as your friends and colleagues are likely also mostly followers of others. You can quickly follow famous people of whatever area you fancy. Follow Donald Trump, for example, if you like to get emotionally disturbed at regular intervals, or whatever other celebrity, politician, organization, and company you are interested in. The World Health Organization, Center for Disease Control, and Public Health England seem obvious right now. But while these are all fine, you need to dig deeper.

Real value comes from finding over-communicating experts in a field.

You can start by looking in your own field where you can more easily recognize such expertise. You can also look for famous people whose opinion you trust and see who they follow or rather who they exchange views with and who they re-tweet or get re-twitted by. Twitter shows you the number of followers someone has so you can recognize “power users”; these are the “influencers“. Obviously, being an influencer is no guaranty of expertise, intelligence, or morality so you need to use your judgment as you do for all other sources of news. Highly visible individuals (aka “accounts of public interest”) get a blue budge showing they are real, (aka “verified”), which can be helpful at the start. Also try to follow influencers you disagree with (e.g., on politics or whatever specific field) but still strike you as trustworthy. Again, this is a good idea for all sources of information.

In contrast, don’t follow random people you do not know, just because they made an outrageous claim that captured your attention or enraged a bunch of others. In fact, my tactic is to not pay any attention to comments by random people unless I do it for entertainment purposes. There are a lot of intellectually rubbish and emotionally nasty tweets out there, as twitter users don’t have to use their real name, and this somehow brings out the worst in some people. There are also many bots spewing filth and misinformation to everyone who would listen, a lot of it directed to popular accounts. These are in my opinion all side effects of the bad social networking business model I commented on at the top of this article. One must learn to just ignore all this to find utility in the medium.

This feed curation exercise, is in fact, the part that takes the longest time and requires some effort. The better you select your sources (the people you follow) the better information you see in your feed. The better you tune out nonsense and nuisance postings the more value you can get out of it.

By the way, there is an interesting inter-play here between podcasts and Twitter. Podcasts are another incredible medium, I highly recommend. This is where you get in-depth information on any subject directly from some of the most interesting people in the world. If you find a podcast host you like, listen to their guests, and follow the ones you appreciate on Twitter. Same goes with books and long form journalism. Many authors are on Twitter and some are very active. If you respect their writing elsewhere you should check them out on Twitter.

To wrap it up, the Internet in general, and Twitter in particular, have a lot to offer in times like this when timely information can make a difference to you personally and maybe to society at large. But to get anything useful out of it you do need to jump through hoops. You need to consciously select who you follow, learn to ignore noise, and mitigate behavior modification techniques used by this and other social networks. It is not easy, but if done right Twitter can be a positive experience overall, or you can be sucked into a horrible filter bubble and be lost forever…. It really depends on you.

OK so this is already longer than I intended. If you reached this point I am impressed and thankful. I hope you got something useful out of it.

Stay home, stay safe.