The political commentariat is in a frenzy over Tesla CEO Elon Musk taking over Twitter. The real world? It couldn’t care less.
While liberal commentators panic over what this change in leadership means for the world’s 15th-largest social media platform, the vast majority of people will simply go on with their everyday lives. In 2019, Pew Research Center determined that just 22% of adults in the United States used Twitter. Of that group, the top 10% were responsible for 80% of tweets from U.S. users on the website.
That means 2.2% of America’s adults are responsible for 80% of U.S. Twitter content.
Ah, but that was in the far-off year of 2019. Pew examined this topic again in 2021, and things have certainly changed. Now, 25% of American adults are on Twitter, and 25% of those users are responsible for 97% of tweets from U.S. users.
Now 6% of American adults are responsible for nearly all U.S. Twitter content. So, for 94% of people, a change in Twitter leadership is not exactly the five-alarm fire MSNBC pundits seem to think it is.
Journalists and activists have a broken view of Twitter, putting far more stock in what people are saying on the platform than it deserves. Twitter is not the pulse of the country: It is a fun-house mirror, distorting your view of the world the longer you look into it. Whether Twitter is run by Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Parag Agrawal, or Ronald McDonald, nothing really changes. Life goes on, and frantic tweets will continue to be fired off into the ether, never to be seen or thought about again.
