We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion

Eve Fairbanks

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WHEN I OPENED Twitter one day a couple of weeks ago, the first piece of “news” I read was that Sam Bankman-Fried killed Jeffrey Epstein. I was never a super-user, but my feed used to feel more relevant and coherent than that. In the first days after Elon Musk sacked the platform, the prospect of Twitter actually collapsing felt like a tail-end risk, something to meme on Twitter: Musk photoshopped onto the Game of Thrones Iron Throne surrounded by ashes. Or its end was presented as a moral necessity, something righteous users who hated Musk would effect by quitting.

Among the users I follow, the mood on the app ever since has resembled the giddiness of 2 am in a dorm room just after the last joint has been smoked, when it’s not clear whether the party is cresting—whether this is the part you’ll remember, the epic hour-long stretch your best man will reconstruct a decade later at your wedding—or whether the party is over and the coolest people have already left. People have tried to keep up the fun by outdoing themselves with jokes and bravado. "If Twitter dies," one friend bragged, “[you will] find me in the woods, no phone. I’ll be so happy.”

But something really is breaking. Things are falling apart. Teams of engineers and moderators have been eroded to nubs. Bugs have begun to multiply as software rot spreads: On Sunday, a tool gone rogue began blocking 4,000 accounts per second. On Tuesday, fleets of influential professors mysteriously lost all their followers. Sewage from newly unbanned, hateful accounts is bubbling out of Twitter’s drains. My own posts are being colonized by anti-Semitic bots and so-called elite business professors—all verified with blue checks—hawking bitcoin giveaways. I have only 5,000 followers, so the fact that these actors are desperate enough to target me feels ominous.

It’s all getting less funny and more scary and sad, fast. This grief, I think, is widely experienced, but it’s barely yet been reckoned with. Most people, even analysts, are trapped talking about Twitter as something whose demise we’ll relish—either as a liberation or as the gripping psychodrama of one bitter billionaire, his karmic comeuppance. Twitter, everyone notes, is far from the biggest social network.

But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts.

It’s easy to calculate Twitter’s economic value as a company: That’s underpinned by reported ad revenue, $4.51 billion last year (and plummeting fast). But there’s a far, far vaster realm beyond that, what an economist might call the secondary value of Twitter. That encompasses the cash people make out of connections or prestige they develop on Twitter, but also the intangible wealth now vested in its communities and in the sense it offers to people of having a place in the world. That human currency cannot just be ported over, unchanged, to Mastodon. There are whole nations whose political discourse occurs mainly on Twitter. The amount of reputational and social wealth that stands to be lost if Twitter collapses is astounding. Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world's biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured.

LAST WEEK, I tweeted that “I would love to see Twitter die.” That instinct came from the fact that Twitter wrought horrible transformations on my field, journalism, before any of its new owner’s actions. Twitter facilitated some of the worst changes in the entire existence of the press in America. I say that without hyperbole and also as someone who thinks the negative impacts of social media on society are generally overstated.

So first, a reckoning with Twitter’s evil. Twitter exponentially intensified the existing inequality in elites’ reach. In my field, I was told—and came to feel—that I had to target my work toward the biggest Twitter accounts. A retweet from someone with millions of followers appeared to be the only thing that separated a piece of work that made no difference to the world and one that made a huge difference. Last year, a top editor at Insider delivered a memo to his writers alerting them that their performance would be judged by “impact points,” which would be determined in part by how much “huge” Twitter commentators interacted with them. This became the attitude of a whole range of publications’ executives—particularly lefty ones, whom research has shown rely substantially more on Twitter than conservatives do. “Huge” Twitter users were those with nearly a million followers or more, a minute subsection of journalists. Tens of thousands of American aspiring writers were publishing and tweeting in no small part to juice the interest of a tiny set of elite opinion makers.

These Twitter super-users became the unacknowledged class that determined which events and ideas were considered important in America, and especially in lefty America. That might seem just to mirror the authority once held by top editors at The New York Times. But the differences are that, once seated, these arbiters could basically never be unseated. Someone can’t get fired from the Twitter elite or even substantially demoted; even if they get suspended, when they come back all their followers automatically reappear. It’s not an accident that the general discourse feels more static than it used to. It’s partly because of Twitter.

Also, the way the arbiters amassed their influence often seemed frustratingly arbitrary—a function of momentum that ultimately built on itself rather than of courage or genius. The Insider editor advised journalists to court the attention of a particular account run by Yashar Ali, a Twitter user whose rise derived from his own praise of and DMs to blue-check writers. Once his account had a blue check, he shot up to nearly 800,000 followers; in 2019, Time named him to its list of the most influential internet commentators, right up there with Donald Trump and US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ali has been praised for his micro-scoops and unique “vulnerability.”

But if you read his feed and imagine it without the praiseful quote-tweets hoping for a follow-back, it’s pretty much as banal as any random person’s: "I’m sure this will be controversial," read one recent, representative post, "but it’s time for cable news guests, panelists etc to return to studios." My friend Andrew, a computer programmer, made this same comment on Facebook a few days before Ali did, to no fanfare. But “every day,” a Los Angeles magazine profile revealed, Ali “is inundated with pleas from journalists” for their attention, because that results “in significant traffic boosts.”

Twitter’s death could be, to reputation, to the concept of “expertise,” the equivalent of Goldman, Barclays, and Citigroup all failing at once, with no bailout option.

Over time, Twitter influence came to be a prime way to land gigs or money offline. Jon Katz, a freelance writer, estimates that “most” of his income is now generated with Twitter’s help. Editors ask him to turn threads into stories, and when he published a book, he says, “a lot of the people who invited me on TV to talk about it I knew from Twitter.” Those interviews drove sales. He got scoops because sources trusted his blue check. In times when Katz has lacked the backing of an institution, he says, “the one thing that I could point to was my Twitter account, where I had a lot of followers.”

Even a lot of what are supposed to be new, fresh, non-mainstream opportunities for journalists now merely replicate or hinge on their Twitter success. Take Substack: According to a WIRED analysis, the authors of the top 50 paid news and politics Substacks who listed their Twitter profiles had 387,046 followers on average when they launched their newsletters. Substack’s CEOs have said they decide who to recruit to the platform according to a method that analyzes writers’ Twitter presences and assigns them between one and four fire emojis. Four fire emojis can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance money to participate in Substack Pro.

And then Twitter remains the way writers sustain their Substacks. The managing editor of the popular tech Substack “Platformer” wrote a year ago that “the only way a Substack grows is through tweets … I have been featured in … newspaper articles, podcasts, radio shows, and blog posts, [but] the only thing that ever moves the needle is some screenshot of [my Substack post] getting 500 likes … It really feels like it’s Twitter or nothing.”

That’s not necessarily the worst thing, except that it normalizes reporting up front for no pay. And the way that building a journalistic Twitter presence demands courting a small set of super-users, combined with the way the platform came to drive journalists’ paid opportunities, has cemented the impression, among non-journalists, that writers who want to get paid invariably become the pawns of elites. A cultural assumption has taken hold that getting paid for reporting ipso facto means you’re a “plant” working at the beck and call of power brokers.

Over the past few weeks, an anonymous Twitter account called @AutismCapital has gathered some of the best news and analysis about the collapse of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. Whoever runs it has been working day and night. @AutismCapital recently polled their followers on whether they ought to be paid for this work going forward, either by partnering with Twitter to monetize their feed or by starting an independent media company or publication.

Dozens of commenters begged the account’s owner not to sell out. “[That] will only” force you to “bend your narrative to the most profitable sectors,” one commenter wrote.

“Just keep to your [unpaid] lane,” another advised. Everybody who tries to boost their Twitter presence to get paid for reporting ends up in the grotesque business of “clout chasing.” That commenter was probably right.

AND SO THE thought of Twitter’s terrible gravitational force of unfathomable inequality getting switched off—and those of us who’ve been spinning near the bottom of the funnel finding ourselves equal, again, with those who had gyrated at the top, often without reason—initially felt thrilling. But I’ve realized that Twitter’s death could be, to reputation, to the concept of “expertise,” the equivalent of Goldman, Barclays, and Citigroup all failing at once, with no bailout option. It would be like the 2008 recession, but for status. And when the bottom falls out, precious things will be destroyed.

Because Twitter has also been magic. The jokey mood around Twitter’s failure right now may be a way to temporarily push aside the breathtaking awareness of this complementary truth. Twitter has enabled phenomenal reporting, including by people who never would have been heard in the old publishing system. It’s where I went to read about the disappearance of two Malaysian planes, about Covid, about the protests over the police’s murder of George Floyd.

I can’t imagine following the breaking-news events I’ve been able to witness virtually—the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the invasion of the US Capitol—on another platform. It’s in these real once-in-history moments that Twitter comes alive. It doesn’t silo people into friend circles like Facebook or promote groupthink quite like Reddit. The barrier to entry for people who want to add to the story is lower than on TikTok or Instagram. You don’t need to angle for a photo or a video; you can tweet while hiding under a desk, or even—as Alexei Navalny does, hand-writing tweets he delivers to his lawyer—from prison.

People giddy to see Musk fall on his face might not fully know what role Twitter plays day to day in many other countries. We’ve heard about Twitter’s role in the Arab Spring but less about how the political life of, for instance, Zimbabwe—run by a repressive government that cracks down ruthlessly on physical protests and political speech—now takes place on Twitter. Twitter has become “our political meeting point,” says Tinashe Mushakavanhu, a Zimbabwean journalist. The app’s anonymity has allowed “a discourse about the country that is very free, very critical.”

Midnight is the hour to reconnoiter on Zimbabwean Twitter, Mushakavanhu says. That’s when cell phone data becomes cheaper; it’s also why Twitter is irreplaceable. Loading image- or video-heavy apps just uses way too much data for most Zimbabweans to afford.

What happens if these immense trees of influence, the users with mere tens of thousands of followers that branch out below the super-users, all wither?

A famous Zimbabwean novelist recently allegorized the internet, and Twitter in particular, as a parallel country. “You have the safety of anonymity if you so choose,” she explained to an interviewer. “That's where most of the organizing [in Zimbabwe] now happens. Activists have made [strides] there that otherwise would not have been possible.”

In Zimbabwe, politicians are forced to respond to Twitter uproars. Twitter is also the place where people who have been forced to flee the country can, in a sense, return home. Waiting for asylum abroad, many of Zimbabwe’s thousands of political refugees “can’t work” legally, Mushakavanhu said. “These are people who can’t go home to bury their own parents.” So they become “very prolific on Twitter. The only thing they have is Twitter. It’s a space for fantasy and for articulating despair. It’s a home.” Mushakavanhu himself has moved to the United Kingdom. He told me, “There are parts of me”—the truly Zimbabwean parts—that now “only exist on Twitter.”

Jeffrey Moyo, another Zimbabwean writer, was arrested in 2021 for helping two New York Times reporters and was held for weeks in several small prison cells with up to 25 other occupants. The prisoners didn’t have space to roll over when they slept on the floor. Separated from his wife and 8-year-old son, and facing a hopelessly biased Zimbabwean judiciary, “I was incredibly depressed about my situation,” he remembers.

One of Moyo’s lawyers, though, is very active on Twitter, with 350,000 followers. Moyo credits his release to the global Twitter outcry his lawyer ignited. He also credits Twitter with preserving his sanity, which might surprise you. When Moyo’s lawyer visited him in prison, he’d always give Moyo a rundown of what people were saying on Twitter about his arrest. “Those tweets—they gave me strength,” Moyo says frankly. “I’m telling you, I think I would have felt completely abandoned if Twitter hadn’t existed. Of course, you hope that your family and friends will care if you’re thrown into jail. But there’s a special strength you feel if you hear that strangers—who owe you nothing—hear of your situation and think, ‘I don’t know this man. But I can tell that what’s happening to him is wrong.’”

Mushakavanhu has the impression that the Zimbabweans he knows on Twitter are strenuously avoiding talking about what might happen if the app fails. Musk’s shenanigans aren’t funny to them. “We don’t have the luxury to leave,” he reflects. Twitter “is free, it’s convenient, and new platforms may not easily re-create the established sense of community we have on there.”

Moyo, for his part, has been paying attention. In recent years, Twitter worked notably hard to ban menacing bots bought by regimes like Rwanda’s and Zimbabwe’s. And so it has made Moyo sad—and frightened—to notice a certain kind of hateful, pro-regime account reemerging after “the advent of Elon Musk.” Worse, he has noticed that some have come back with a blue check.

TWITTER’S TREMENDOUS INFLUENCE can be seen in the fact that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was both made and unmade by the platform: Tweets by a rival crypto kingpin in early November helped kick off the unraveling of Bankman-Fried’s sham. Around the same time, The New York Times ran a profile of the writer Molly Jong-Fast, whose redemption from a troubled youth as Erica Jong’s daughter was wholly facilitated by her anti-Trump Twitter feed. (An exhibit of her tweets embroidered onto handkerchiefs and doilies opened in September at a Chelsea gallery; the tweet-doilies have sold for nearly $10,000.) Whether or not you think her rise is justified by the quality of her work, there are thousands of writers who now depend on Twitter relationships with juggernauts like Jong-Fast for their own work’s visibility. According to a WIRED analysis of a selection of posts by several users with less than 25,000 followers, a retweet by Molly Jong-Fast helped make that post one of their top-performing tweets of the year. What happens if these immense trees of influence, the users with mere tens of thousands of followers that branch out below the super-users, all wither? There’s staggering downstream liability.

I don’t think Jong-Fast actually wants to know what it would be like to compete again on a real even playing field of ideas with my friend Andrew the computer programmer. But people like Jong-Fast—who hosts regular A-list parties at her multimillion-dollar Upper East Side apartment—have some prior networks of wealth and status to fall back on. It’s the Zimbabwean intellectuals, the hundreds of modestly successful Substackers, and the writers like @AutismCapital who don’t.

Think of how devastating it was to the anti-vax influencers Alex Berenson and Robert Malone to be kicked off Twitter. They happened to be grifters. But if Twitter died, that devastation would be everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of people's careers are now driven principally on Twitter. Many academics have built popular audiences entirely on Twitter, as well as enriched their professional networks. The chatter among otherwise siloed young professors and postdocs on there has become indispensable.

Twitter taught us things. We’ve learned we can dare to enter spaces—rooms where the gentry are speaking—we might not have tried to get into before. And at the same time, we’ve learned that the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own.

I think some people are embarrassed to admit what Twitter has really come to mean for them. “[I] would gladly pay $100 a month to keep Twitter alive,” a comedian with 34,000 followers recently tweeted. The ratio against him was merciless. It’s uncool to say you sincerely care about Twitter. Users accused the comedian of being a lame-ass, a suck-up, an elite: “Wow so to you $100 is cheap?” “I’d probably pay $100 to kill Twitter instead.”

But I’ve noticed that political strategists and academics have begun begging their followers not to leave the app. They typically couch these appeals as pleas for the sake of some greater good or community. And yet they’re often figures who have come to have thousands of readers they never could influence without Twitter. And, because any bid not to lose followers inevitably comes off as shamefully status-seeking, their pleas are often ignored. But many are just pleading for their livelihoods, and we should listen.

A VIRTUAL CIVILIZATION that became vital to our world is shuddering. A lot of the best reporting on what’s going on at Twitter has been revealed on Twitter, by citizen journalists and employees of the app as well as professional investigative reporters; we are gradually being plunged into a kind of dark. Twitter’s “Trending” column, even recently, was useful. The other day, Twitter told me the top trending topic where I live, in South Africa, was Tylenol, a brand that is not even sold here. When I wondered what was trending in Athens and located myself there via VPN, I received the unnerving news that Dan Quayle is trending at the Parthenon.

In Rome, Mike Pompeo was trending. I assume that’s because his last name is Italian and no real minds exist at Twitter to curate trends anymore, only an algorithm that catches tailings of fuel in the form of tweets and lights them on fire at random, like a downed electric line in a hellscape throwing sparks at the massive oil slick left by the careering 30-ton tanker truck that is Elon Musk’s vanity.

I remember learning about the Roman Colosseum in elementary school. It was built at Rome’s apex, for games, historical reenactments, forums, and funerals. The elite ran the show, in one sense, but 95 percent of those who went there were ordinary people—women, the poor, foreigners. As Rome swelled and became decadent, the Colosseum increasingly turned into a space for brutal spectacle, where exotic imported animals tore condemned men apart for onlookers’ pleasure. I remember learning that the Colosseum was abandoned after Rome was sacked in 410 AD.

I learned more recently that this isn’t true. The Colosseum was never abandoned entirely. Over a century later, long after the king of the Visigoths tore through Rome, animal hunts were still held there—though pettier ones, with deer instead of tigers.

As central organization broke down, hawkers combed the stands to lure people to sideshows while craftsmen set up ad hoc shops, a little like the way Twitter users are now desperately directing their followers toward their accounts on other platforms and the “elite business professors” are popping into comments to tout their crypto schemes. Twitter users are now imagining their last tweet, immortalized as a moment in history: “Like, right when I fire off something thirsty about Paul Newman’s ghost … the site crashes forever.” But it’s most likely that Twitter will shamble on for a long time, like the Colosseum did, and we’ll never quite know if we’re participating in its glorious and hilarious finale. I actually think the prospect of Twitter’s rapid demise—in weeks or months—is functioning, right now, as fantasy. It’s a fantasy that absolves users of the need to adjudicate for themselves the point at which it’s become truly dangerous or useless.

But the dramatic Twitter death fantasy also strips us of the opportunity to deeply consider what we’d want to save of Twitter, if we could, and what it’s done to us. Even if we all woke up one morning and Twitter had vanished, some of it would still be with us, unless we decide otherwise. Ways of relating and presumptions that hold true on Twitter now seem true in real life. The mores encapsulated and encouraged in the amphitheater bled out beyond the Colosseum’s walls; a kind of violence became more acceptable in society because inside the amphitheater, for most people, the stakes appeared to be nothing. It seems Donald Trump believes all his voters will magically return to him, like followers automatically repopulate when you’re reinstated after a Twitter suspension, now that he’s bidding for another chance to helm the United States government. Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, has said he intends to raise the $8 billion he needs to cover all of FTX’s withdrawal requests in two weeks, like super-users seem to pop up undiminished after every “definitive” takedown. To him, it seems, his investors weren’t real—not even as people to be feared. They were usernames in a follow-for-follow status shell game.

Twitter taught us things. We’ve learned we can dare to enter spaces—rooms where the gentry are speaking—we might not have tried to get into before. And at the same time, we’ve learned that the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own, especially ideas that stoke lulz or predict a civilization-ending crisis. We’ve learned that everything is shocking, unbelievable, unprecedented—and, simultaneously, that nothing really matters.

When I refreshed my feed the other day, it showed me a link to a viral video of a flock of sheep walking dumbly in a circle. “Sign of the Apocalypse?” it read. “Sheep in Mongolia Have Been Walking in a Circle for 10 Days Straight and No One Knows Why.” People may actually know why sheep do this. Sheep can get sick and start listing to the side, caught in a loop. Or, as one expert observed, they can get a glitch in their hive mind and start circling out of frustration about being confined. There’s a man who could stop Twitter’s decline if he wanted to. And if we wanted to, we could consider what of Twitter we need to mourn, and what we might want to save or re-create.