{"id":23772,"date":"2022-12-15T17:19:24","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T17:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/15\/2022-notebook-charting-the-unexpected-direction-of-twitter\/"},"modified":"2022-12-15T17:19:24","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T17:19:24","slug":"2022-notebook-charting-the-unexpected-direction-of-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/15\/2022-notebook-charting-the-unexpected-direction-of-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"2022 Notebook: Charting the unexpected direction of Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"

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THE BACKGROUND: Billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 began what would turn out to be an upending of one of the world’s predominant social media platforms. <\/p>\n

It’s an upheaval that is still continuing \u2014 fueled by Musk’s actions after he took over, his approaches to free speech and advisory oversight, how users’ feeds are changing, who can say what \u2014 and, of course, the tweets he casts into the world each day. The shift in Twitter under Musk has caused some users to abandon the platform, others to double down on it and some critics to express worry about its direction and the voices it is amplifying. <\/p>\n

Here, Barbara Ortutay, who has been covering social media for more than a decade for The Associated Press, talks about the events of the year around Twitter and its sale, and delves into her reporting \u2014 and into why Twitter still matters to so many. <\/p>\n

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BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP technology writer:<\/p>\n

It was all the way back in January that Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, started buying shares of Twitter, which wouldn\u2019t be that weird on its own. But that\u2019s when we started paying attention that something might be happening. <\/p>\n

We\u2019re used to covering companies buying other companies. But we\u2019re not used to covering people buying companies so much, and certainly not the world\u2019s richest man buying this communications ecosystem that hundreds of millions of people depend on. So it wasn’t just a business story or a mergers and acquisitions story. It symbolizes so much of what\u2019s going on in tech, and online speech, and also in the economy and who has power in this world. I couldn\u2019t look away. By the end of the summer, things were changing almost daily. We had to cover it as a news story, but at the same time, we were covering this thing on Twitter. Journalists have a very special relationship with Twitter, for better and for worse. We communicate on it. We see what other people are up to. We look for sources. It’s huge. So sometimes it felt like a little bit like the rug was being pulled out from under us. <\/p>\n

There’s a lot of chaos. There’s a lot of noise. It\u2019s very easy to fall into just covering the loudest voices or the biggest storyline. So we made a decision pretty early on to focus on the people who use Twitter. And I think that that resulted in a lot of interesting stories. For us, it was important to take a step back so that we didn’t just become his megaphone \u2014 like \u201cMusk did this,\u201d \u201cMusk said that,\u201d because also he was changing his mind so quickly. He would say one thing one day, and then turn around and say something the opposite the next day. So you have to put it in context. And we can also cover it in a way like: Who is who is affected by the rise of extremism on Twitter? What does that do to people? How does that actually silence speech? <\/p>\n

One thing that\u2019s important to understand is that Twitter is not just in the United States. The majority of its users are not even in the U.S. So right now, a lot of the chatter about Twitter is very much focused on U.S. politics and the U.S. differences between the left and right. And 80% of Twitter users are outside of the U.S. I\u2019m willing to go out on a limb that they do not care about, or know about, Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop or conservative speech suppression. So even though the loudest voices on Twitter that we can see have been focused on this story, for us it\u2019s important to take a step back and understand that most of most of the people who use Twitter, you know, are not us. And they don\u2019t care about the same things that we do. And yet Twitter is really important to them, probably maybe even more important than it is to us. <\/p>\n

We’ve all spent so much time ragging on Twitter and not really liking Twitter. I remember the night that that Elon Musk laid off half of Twitter, and people started quitting or looking for other platforms to go to \u2014 places like Mastodon, which is another social media platform. I started losing followers, people who left. I didn\u2019t realize until then how much Twitter actually mattered to me. And I think that might be true for other people on the platform, too. <\/p>\n

It has been, it still is, a community \u2014 many communities tied together. And despite a lot of other social media sites popping up right now, there\u2019s really nothing else quite like it. I think Elon Musk realized that when he decided to buy it. I will tell you what I think is special about it: the people on it. And a huge part of that is just the diversity of countries and people and regions. And anything that\u2019s coming up right now to replace it is way more siloed. If this goes, I\u2019m not sure if if anything will replace it in the same way.<\/p>\n

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2022 Notebooks: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/reporters-notebook<\/p>\n<\/div>\n