Not even a quarter of the country uses Twitter, and of those who do, just 10% produce more than 9 in 10 of Americans’ tweets. Yet, if you flip to the editorial pages and business channels of the nation’s top newsrooms, you’d think someone died.
The New York Times alone boasts four op-eds lamenting Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the social media giant, wedging tirades about the billionaire’s scary “free speech absolutism” between panic pieces about anti-free speech fascists like Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter isn’t the most important social media site on the internet, and it’s not particularly close, but Musk is an outsider who gained the reins of the ultimate social network for the nation’s capital. For Washington D.C., and to a lesser extent, the rest of the media, Twitter isn’t just Twitter. It’s Tinder, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, and Musk threatens to undermine that game.
Pew found that the quarter of the country that uses Twitter is roughly the same amount as those who use TikTok — and an even smaller amount on Pinterest. It’s true that Twitter skews to the Left. Users aren’t just disproportionately whiter, richer, and more educated than users of other social media sites — they’re also more liberal than the rest of the Democratic Party as a whole.
But the ideological bent is perhaps less important than the dominance Twitter has achieved in the daily lives of the commentariat. Twitter is a useful news aggregation tool for the media just as it is for the rest of the world. Proof of Twitter’s ability to accelerate the news cycle from the already rapid pace of cable news was the Trump era, fueled by 3 a.m. tweets and a president who never seemed to sleep. But as evidenced by his successor, even the most senile of presidents can’t stop his Too Online chief of staff from turning Twitter into an oracle for the White House press corps to decipher.
By now, most understand how Twitter is just as potent in helping the media create the narrative. Twitter trends, by definition, reward and amplify the fact-free echo chambers of liberals lambasting the Florida bill barring schools from instructing nine-year-old children about gender identity as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and despite Twitter’s relative lack of engagement with news articles overall, in relation to other social media sites, it’s safe to say the average East Coast news editor spends more time flicking through Quote Tweets than on Facebook.
Furthermore, Twitter has truly become a social network in the Beltway. Pithy quips, dunks, and appeals to pathos reverberate across social circles of people who know each other personally. D.C. is a physically small city with a socially stratified enough circle of revolving-door intermingling writers, lobbyists, and politicos that tweet. It doesn’t just succeed at securing offers for radio and television hits. It fills the gaps of everything else socially for an otherwise tremendously awkward city.
I’m the last person to mock the outsize importance Twitter has here! Prior to moving to D.C., I knew exactly one lifelong friend in Arlington, but a Twitter friend passed along my resume, ultimately resulting in this job. I met my first boyfriend out of college, who followed me on Twitter, at a party hosted by a friend I had met on Twitter. I know multiple now-married couples who met on Twitter in either New York City or D.C. and countless best friendships across the Acela corridor. Twitter is, for those of us in the Beltway, a highly effective social network specifically because it platforms substantive and, at times, contentious conversations. But that’s a bug, not a feature, of its intended purpose to democratize conversations.
And Musk has the ability to disrupt all of this. The entrepreneur evidently wants to offer blue check marks to the plebeians who pay for Twitter Blue, and by tweaking the algorithm to reward pure traffic over the proclivities of tastemakers, the only real power handed to the lowest paid of the white-collar class — you’d best believe journalists secretly seethe at the six-figure salaries earned by their counterparts at investment banks and law firms — risks being ripped away.
The tastemakers of every other industry have lost all of their old elite power. Instagram influencers have thoroughly disrupted the fashion industry, rendering Anna Wintour and Vogue prematurely irrelevant. Cryptocurrency has already exposed the vulnerability of the U.S. dollar’s dominance, and the early silencing of COVID-19 “conspiracy theorists” previewed the chaos social media have threatened to the scientific establishment. Musk might democratize Twitter and shatter the social network relied upon by its gatekeepers in the process. It’s a political risk for them, but more salient, it’s a professional one.
