For some, it was the Nazi-adjacent salute; for others, it was Elon Musk using his millions to help Donald Trump get elected. But the exodus from Twitter/X began as far back as 2022, when Musk bought the social media site that had become the global town square and began remaking it in his own image.
As the hegemony of X ebbs away and it looks more and more like a billionaire’s political plaything, there are questions about what tools humanity – the two-thirds of it that has Internet access – will use to talk to itself and what that choice of media will mean: what social media is for.
There’s a networking theory called Metcalfe’s Law that says that the value of a network rises exponentially with the number of its users – that is, it’s the number of possible connections that counts, not the total number of users. Thirty million users translate to about 450 trillion possible connections.
But the real value of social media connections, as one journalist astutely noted, is a function of who is on a platform, and how they are connected. Twitter, for instance, was the go-to site for mainstream journalists. For me, it was the latest iteration in a series of online communities that served the needs of the moment: first early bulletin boards, through to the witty 1990s site Salon where I met fellow writers, to groups where I could commune with others facing the medical challenges I endured in the early aughts, offering the kind of understanding I couldn’t find IRL. Twitter was a bit of each, an endless stream of fascinating, sympathetic voices of my choosing. It was more than an echo chamber – I also followed accounts that gave views I disagreed with, if only to keep an eye on what the other side was up to.
Social media can feed our vanity, but it also offers connection; the early bulletin boards linked up marginalised communities who might never have found each other; it’s easy to forget how hard it used to be to get information, if what you needed to know was at all out of the ordinary. The Internet may have some roots in the military, but it also sprang from California hippies who dreamed of friction-free communion.
Then, in late 2022, Musk bought Twitter and X-ed (including making the content moderation teams ex-employees), and it began to change: it became more confrontational,