My guess is that Twitter will die. It will be no more. When might that happen?
There are many headlines in the last few months and weeks along the lines of: Can Elon Musk kill Twitter or cause Twitter to die?
The Atlantic October 27th had an article that asks: can Musk kill Twitter immediately? The article's author thought that unlikely.
The author then goes on to ask the next question: Can Musk "kneecap Twitter via inept management?" That was discussed in detail. It seemed a more likely scenario. The area of vulnerability is the two key teams of site-reliability engineers and the internal trust-and-safety team which handles content moderation.
The article outlines what would happen if these teams lose engineers. All kinds of risks are real - hackers/hostile foreign governments, dealing with government subpoenas or law-enforcement requests, fraudsters operating low-level scams on the platform are not stopped, inexperienced engineer "pushes some buggy code and part of the site's functionality goes down".
There's the possibility that Musk does roll back Twitter's content-moderation rules and reduces tools for monitoring and reporting abuse. This results in a bad product with more radicalized communities, and so reduced users and advertising and a slow, dwindling death.
We the public likely think like Musk social media platforms are "technology". But moderating content requires intelligence.
"Those with trust-and-safety experience at the platform told me that a big percentage of the job is dealing with the messy edge cases that are difficult for a computer to decipher ... Language and the meaning of language always evolves, but on the internet, that happens a billion times faster,” she told me. “And if what online speech governance does is manage the harms of how people communicate, it has to be constantly working and changing. It’s not like an oil change.”
i reference Warzel's article because it gets at the core issue/fact. Social platforms aren't like the old world organization. Their product is people interacting in communities. This makes the product "living and breathing".
And what is Warzel's conclusion - seems to me the likely scenario of Twitter's future:
"Living, breathing things do one thing quite reliably: They eventually die, for all kinds of reasons. They die of natural causes, or because of direct harm. They die because of unforeseeable events. Musk very well could kill Twitter out of malice or hubris, or through calculated, boneheaded decisions. But one possibility seems more likely than others. If Twitter dies at the hands of this billionaire, the cause is likely to be tragically banal—neglect.
Let's hope it is neglect and not malice/abuse which he seems to be good at.
Here's some wall art from a few years ago. A good title might be "Love Found".
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