Is Twitter Still Relevant?

Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated

Elon Musk        

Note: some tweet examples in this article contain offensive language.

Elon Musk certainly thinks Twitter is still relevant, having recently agreed to put about ￡35bn of his fortune in to buying the company, and creating a Twitter storm in the process.

Now everybody is wondering what he's going to do with it, what's his vision for the company, what features might soon appear on the platform and, most importantly, will Donald Trump be allowed back?

Twitter launched in 2006, with a very simple, unique format: each tweet could be no longer than 140 characters, and "hashtag" suddenly became a buzzword. I joined the platform in 2007, as did a small contingent of publicans all looking to see if we could utilise it to market our businesses, alongside the relatively unknown Facebook.

But, while carrying some growth, Twitter didn't really get popular until 2009, when Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift late at night and began a live update of his experience.

At that point, Twitter suddenly made sense: it became the platform for immediacy. News announcements broke on Twitter quicker than any other platform and it became the go-to source for live sports, breaking news updates, and commentary.?

But while Facebook was connecting people in a way MySpace and Friends Reunited had failed to do, Twitter slowly became a cesspool for the worst that society could show.

Its immediacy and relative anonymity allowed the growth of the 'troll'. Fake news began to spread. News of Harrison Ford's death broke and was even reported on major news channels, including the BBC, such was a reporters belief in what they read on the platform. (Info: at the time of writing, Harrison Ford is still very much alive.) Several other 'fake deaths' were announced, and Twitter started needing to be fact-checked before news was reported.

This became a hook that Donald Trump regularly hung his hat on: fake news. Despite being a superfan of the platform, he also berated it, and other social platforms, for their ability to spread misinformation. Although he was just as keen on doing that himself, and then disputing it when people accused him of such...

In 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, an artificial intelligence that communicated via Twitter. It was an experiment to see if AI could learn to communicate with human beings without them knowing they were talking to, essentially, a robot.

It started out well, with Tay thinking humans were cool...

It was shut down just 24 hours later after it learned everything it needed to know about humans from Twitter:

If artificial intelligence was ever truly created, it's often said that its first job would be to eradicate the human race...

In 2017, in an attempt to refresh the platform, Twitter increased the character limit from 140 to 280. Not revolutionary, and just allowed Donald Trump to tweet more in a single message.

The platform has long been stagnating. While it has staved off charges from competitors such as Google's Buzz, Meta's collection of social platforms truly owns the social space. As Meta learns more about us, it's used that knowledge to generate revenue through highly targeted advertising; while Twitter has tried desperately to release new features, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok have all surpassed the performance of Twitter.

Elon Musk is still, though, a superfan of the platform. To paraphrase Victor Kiam, he liked the company so much he bought it.

But what will he do with it next?

While it's not yet completely clear, Elon does want to open up the algorithms, make the platform more open source, and ensure free speech. (That probably means Donald Trump will be allowed back on the platform.)

No doubt his first steps will be to make the platform 'human friendly', removing the millions of spam bots that exist, and verify real people.

Given how successful Mr Musk has been with software businesses in the past, such as PayPal, and his technology businesses including Tesla and SpaceX, the future of Twitter is now quite exciting.

I've not really used the platform properly for many years, using it only to talk with the Formula 1 community during races, but now I'm beginning to pay attention to it again. It might suddenly be about to become relevant once more.

But Elon better be quick. Since being banned by Twitter and Facebook, Donald Trump has launched his own social platform, called Truth Social, and that's currently out-performing Twitter and TikTok in the Apple Store...

What do you think Musk should do with Twitter? Let me know in the comments.