By Amit Mishra Last week brought the closure of one of the much-awaited acquisitions in tech history, touted as one of the largest buy-outs of all time in the technological arena. Elon Musk’s $44-billion takeover of the social media platform Twitter buzzed the global mindspace with notes of excitement and agony. The week’s upheaval saw […]
By Amit Mishra
Last week brought the closure of one of the much-awaited acquisitions in tech history, touted as one of the largest buy-outs of all time in the technological arena. Elon Musk’s $44-billion takeover of the social media platform Twitter buzzed the global mindspace with notes of excitement and agony. The week’s upheaval saw Musk’s poetic assertion of freeing the caged bird and then unabashedly sacking many C-Suite level executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal.
Deeming it ‘the most interesting place on the Internet’, the basis of the acquisition stems from Musk’s common notion of ‘improving humanity and human experience’. Thus, the social media platform takeover promises the same enriching experience where people can exercise creative independence and free speech. For the business magnate, conceptualising a digital platform where people can voice their opinions freely or debate opinions, in a civilised manner, is as crucial as expanding human consciousness to Mars.
It will be interesting to observe how the social media behemoth’s future plays out given that it is now experiencing a significant shake-up. With Musk dissolving the board and proclaiming himself as the sole director, things don’t seem to quiet down any soon. While the people are divided in their disposition, the common element that binds the segregation is the general idea of influence and power of the platform that runs through all.
A 16-year Journey
Twitter, maybe unbeknownst to many, is the most powerful social media platform. In the 16 years of its existence, it has developed into a force that has boosted grassroots discussions, undermined the top-down style of political leadership and thought, and given voice to those that have long been marginalised. From redefining the Black Lives Matter movement to permanently banning the sitting president of the United States in 2019, the influence it holds is certainly not circumscribed by the lesser number of characters at the user’s disposal (280 now)
The validation of the fact on influence and power comes from the recent study conducted by Pew Research, which surveyed nearly 12,000 journalists on the usage of social media platforms. Twitter emerged as the most likeable platform. This indicates that a lot of the reporting is, at least in part, impacted by tweeted opinions. And the impact it had on people since the last decade is too colossal to pass over. Twitter was used by pro-democracy activists in Libya and Egypt to overthrow dictatorships. It was utilised by Americans to occupy Wall Street. And in 2013, Black Lives Matter became popular on Twitter following George Zimmerman’s acquittal of killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager.
The notion that Twitter was an underdog’s dream and a tool for bottom-up organising that would empower dissidents and marginalised groups, overthrow corrupt institutions and enable the common man to converse on an equal footing with tycoons and tyrants was one of the defining moments of the last decade and was fueled by these revolutionary campaigns.
When the Covid wave struck India, it was through Twitter that people mobilised oxygen cylinders and beds. But the succour was never limited to Covid times. For the last eight years, the Indian government through its official ministry handles has been aiding its citizens in myriads of requests and supplications ranging from bringing distressed expatriates from foreign countries to listening to grievances about rail services. But how did Twitter become so relevant in modern times? How did a slipshod startup turn into a behemoth platform for challenging the officialdom? When did a platform with a narrow user base of nerds and dweebs start commanding more than 396 million of its adherents, with more than 200 million daily active users?
The Beginnings
Success…
Twitter was founded in 2006 with the idea of a service that would enable quick text updates from anywhere in the world by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. It was a side project that grew out of the podcasting platform called Odeo. The original iteration of this platform, known as ‘twttr,’ was only utilised by Odeo employees.
Twitter was unveiled to the public on July 15, 2006. According to Lifewire, the technology information and advice website, Twitter took off at the Southwest (SXSW) festival in 2007, where over 60,000 tweets were posted every day. On November 7, 2013, Twitter made its stock market debut with an IPO, priced at $26 per share and was valued at $31 billion. Since then till its acquisition, it grew substantially reaching the peak valuation of $55 billion in Q2 2021. This meteoric rise turned all the founders into prominent tech figures and when Twitter went public, it established its three creators, Williams, Stone and Dorsey, as billionaires and the biggest success story in Silicon Valley.
…and Betrayal
Amidst all the bling of the success, one name was missing in every victory milestone celebration and that was of Noah Glass, who was instrumental in setting up Twitter in its initial years. Even though it was originally his firm — the first office was his apartment and he was the one who came up with its famous moniker ‘Twttr’, Glass was dubbed as the forgotten founder who profited virtually nothing from the website. After being fired and erased from Twitter’s history, he received a minor financial stake in the company, which he eventually sold off a few years later. His co-founders never refer to him by name in interviews, and when someone searches for ‘Twitter founders,’ even though there are images of all four of them, the image of Glass displayed in the search is not his image.
According to Nick Bilton’s book, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, Glass experienced a depressive episode and said that as the company grew, he turned into a loner who isolated himself from friends. Without Glass, Twitter most certainly wouldn’t exist. All of the early workers and investors in Odeo concur that Glass was the only person at Odeo who was most enthusiastic about Twitter at the beginning.
When asked, Glass modestly insisted that he is not Twitter’s sole founder but given that his contribution has essentially been erased from Twitter’s history, he asserts that he feels wronged and betrayed. The story of the creation of Twitter through the words of its founders and top executives will always be different from the actual story. In their stories, the one official founder will always have a missing place.
Years of Unbridled Domineering
Fall from Grace…
By 2011, Twitter had established itself as a crucial social media platform in mobilising the Arab Spring movement, and for the wave of anti-government demonstrations that swept Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, and was widely used by protesters to coordinate and disseminate reports.
In 2012, the active user base of Twitter grew to 200 million users. The year 2012 was also marked as a year when Barack Obama utilised the platform to officially announce his victory in the US presidential elections through a tweet. By 2012, people started to hail it as a platform to assist those with opposite opinions to organise and express themselves in oppressive regimes all over the world. It was now referred to as a space that provided a voice to the voiceless. By the end of 2013, Twitter emerged as an indomitable social media platform that enjoyed its presence not only among the hoi polloi but also the elites.
As the platform kept on garnering more and more users, no one really anticipated that it shall turn into a giant powerful company that can shape the context of political discourse in one part of the world and can cause riots and mayhem in another. The platform scaled to the point when it absolutely did not worry about what consequential imprints it shall leave on its user base.
As an example, Twitter was Trump’s preferred medium up until the end of his administration, when he was permanently suspended for tweeting in favour of the January 6th Capitol riots. In the past when more elite users were proscribed from using the platform, they shifted to other social media platforms to exercise the same influence that they used to at their Twitter peak but failed to do so. This is what separated Twitter from Facebook and Google.
Though it has a meagre user base compared to Facebook, Twitter has played a humongous role in influencing events around the world. The platform has ascended to higher echelons but the years of ascension are also marred with allegations of bias toward censorship. It was alleged that the platform favoured users with specific ideologies and was stringent towards others.
In a study conducted by the professors of MIT and Yale in 2020, titled “Is Twitter Biased Against Conservatives? The Challenge of Inferring Political Bias in a Hyper-Partisan Media Ecosystem”, the researchers inferred that there was some degree of bias demonstrated by the platform with regard to the suspension of accounts. In October 2020, researchers tracked 9,000 politically active Twitter users, half of whom were Democrats and half of whom were Republicans. Six months following the 2020 election, the writers kept a record of their Twitter activity. The survey did discover a bias in the percentage of users from each party who had their accounts suspended — 7.7% of the Democrats and 35.6% of the Republicans witnessed account suspension.
…and Takeover
This is where the story of the Twitter takeover sets in. The billionaire visionary Elon Musk, who is known for his major disruptions in space and automobile industries, is also a Twitter-phile (boasts 114 million followers) and spends a considerable amount of his free time tweeting, had alleged in the past that the platform is a subject to political prejudice and excessive moderation.
Musk had begun discussing his objectives for the platform in public. He intended to make its recommendation algorithms open source and relax the moderation policies. He promised to eliminate permanent bans, apart from bots and online impostors, whom he vowed to permanently ban. He privately invested around $3 billion last spring to acquire a 9.2% interest in the business and became Twitter’s largest shareholder almost immediately. Then a few days later he had a change of plan and wanted the full pie instead of a piece. At $54.20 a share, he made an offer to buy the entire business with a condition that the social media platform reveal the details of bots’ accounts. After months of long turmoil and a legal battle, he assented to the Twitter buyout at $44 billion on 27th October.
To surmise the takeover is an arduous task, but we know for sure that the future of Twitter shall entail getting rid of its opacity and making the platform more open source. Musk has championed the same idea in Tesla Motors, where all the patents are open source and is bound by a patent pledge, and shall seek to emulate the same at Twitter. The aphorism that comes out from the lengthy chronicle is that no platform in the world, doesn’t matter how powerful, is bigger than the user base, and sometimes it takes a billionaire with strange humour to reinvigorate and reinstall the values of the first principles, as to why the platform exists in the first place? It is only for the user.
(The author is Academic Associate, Indian School of Business)