Despite all the hype, the real Twitter is not up for sale
On a typical day last week, my iPhone was logged into Twitter for over five hours. That puts me in the minority in the United States. In 2021, according to a Pew Research survey, only about a quarter of American adults used Twitter.
Like most Americans, my friends are normal people who do not enjoy a baseline cortisol level set to “constant panic”. Twitter is a small commons, not commonly held. It is nowhere near the largest or most profitable social networking site, but it is loud. It is a kaffeeklatsch for educated, middle-class cultural workers who kind of hate their jobs. Young people think we are old for using Twitter. Normal people think we are strange.
When I posted my first tweet almost 12 years ago, I could not figure out what to do on the platform. But neither did I dance or sing or do slam poetry. As a southern black female cultural worker, I had two public roles left: I could be wise, which meant matronly, or I could be a doe-eyed ingenue who dreams of living in Brooklyn. I was unsuited for both.
As it turned out, I was extremely well suited for the digital iteration of black diasporic sociolinguistic traditions that we colloquially call Black Twitter. There are many such sociolinguistic communities and fandoms — selforganising communities of enthusiasts — on social media, but few have changed the tone and texture of media and culture like Black Twitter.
Black Twitter is not a place or a group of people but a set of communication practices, like signifying and call and response. It is also a group of knowledges — for instance, a genealogy of misogynoir. And it includes shared language, culture and references. Above all, Black Twitter is a repository, as when it archives public memory of cultural events. Black Twitter is instrumental to the platform’s cultural significance; to be good at Twitter is to borrow aspects of that black sociolinguistic practice but make it feel authentic.
Becoming good at Twitter developed my voice and knocked me around as I professionalised. It did that for a lot of people who make things that matter, even to nontweeters.
Whether that is enough for Twitter itself to continue to matter is another question.
Twitter nurtured a cohort of raconteurs and new media stars. They came not only from New York and Los Angeles or from elite institutions. Talented people tweeted their way into conversations that defined politics, art and popular culture. Such talent has always existed, but that fact has not always been irrefutable. In a 2019 interview, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, implied that women and people of colour do not write a lot of magazine features because they are not always ready to tackle projects at that scale. People like Soraya McDonald, Adam Serwer, ZZ Packer and Kiese Laymon wrote long pieces that were easy to find. Instead of arguing about whether talented people of colour could write feature-length articles, Twitter made the conversation about why Mr Goldberg did not know the writers who were capable of doing them. It is a subtle, powerful shift of responsibility.
That pattern was duplicated in television, magazines, newsrooms, think tanks, nonprofits and political campaigns, making it hard to credibly claim that one could not find a trans screenwriter or a black producer or an indigenous scholar. By changing the tastes of tastemakers, Twitter made your media diet more diverse today than it was 10 years ago, with little effort on your part. Twitter introduced itself to the world in 2006 as a microblogging platform. Blogging had a tone: snarky and personality-driven, with rapid-fire wit and counterintuitive hooks to draw in casual readers. The most successful bloggers were white and coastal, which is a nice way of saying they were from New York or DC. In media, that pedigree has long sufficed as a substitute for personality and skill.
The butch blogger style popularised by sites like Gawker got most of the initial media attention and investment. But platforms like LiveJournal were producing a digital writer different enough from that mould that it does not seem right to call them both bloggers. LJ was a mash-up of blog-like posts and Myspace-like social networking organised around interests and identities. Blogging was one-way communication: The blogger pontificated, and the audience left comments. The purpose was amplifying the blogger. In contrast, LJ was relational, a two-way conversation between writer and audience. Feminist, queer, black and other minority communities on LJ encouraged collaboration. Critically, an LJ writer was also a member of the audience. That created a sense of responsibility for one to another.
What happened to LJ is an instructive example of what happens when people migrate from one platform to another. In 2007, a Russian media company bought LJ. Some LJ users were alarmed by many things, which coalesced into a general malaise with the platform. Researchers Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym published case studies on what happens when communities leave a social media platform. Ms Fiesler and Ms Dym pointed out that users don’t abandon a platform for one reason. Platforms do all kinds of things that power users hate, and they do not leave because of a tyrannical owner or political influence or unpopular features. Users leave a platform for some combination of all of those things and also when they have somewhere new to go. In the case of LiveJournal, the place to move was Twitter. Twitter’s future may hinge less on who owns it than on what someone else builds.
When black LJ writers migrated to Twitter, they brought fragments of their communication style with them, and it seeded Twitter’s style and purpose. This style influences every facet of new and legacy media. That is not an understatement. It has rewritten the acceptable bounds of discourse on politics and culture and economics and policy. Twitter’s text-based communication makes it hard to strip away the genealogy of ideas. Hashtags may seem silly, but they are a user innovation that tries to solve an age-old problem of attribution. #OscarsSoWhite, #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName and #DefundthePolice are document trails from the communities that innovate to the industries and culture that use that innovation. And it is the most difficult part of Twitter to control or commodify.
If you are a billionaire who wants to buy Twitter, you probably want to buy the Twitter that changes conversations and innovates culture. But the Twitter that Elon Musk is buying is not guaranteed to be that Twitter. Twitter’s significance is not about revenue or advertising platforms or new features. It is about communities that create ideas. The real Twitter lives in the practices of people who can migrate at any time. User migration and social fragmentation are the real present threat to Twitter’s cultural dominance.
Power users like me may tweet through new ownership and new politics, but that will not necessarily mean we care about what is happening on Twitter. Money can buy a lot, but it cannot buy everything that matters.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an American writer, sociologist, and professor. She is currently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and is also an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is also an opinion columnist at The New York Times.