At their zenith social media platforms represented the natural evolution of the telephone. They combined the immediacy of the phone with the impact of text and images. They became a means to connect not only with family and friends, and to creep ex-lovers; but to meet people all over the world – for “free”1. I joined facebook and Twitter in spring of 2009 as one of my friends was organizing our 20th high school reunion. It was fun reconnecting with people I hadn’t seen in 20 years, sending them digital eggs that hatched on their profile pages and pouring over the photos of their weddings and children and vacations. Facebook was the more preferred platform for the group, but I hung out on Twitter too hoping people would join, following the occasional actor who signed up to promote their book or movie or new cooking show... By the time 2011 rolled around I was barely on facebook anymore. Turns out there was a reason I hadn’t spoken to the people from high school in 20 years – we had nothing in common, and frankly their facebook feeds were nothing but endless vapid humblebrag photos. (Yeah, yeah, I can hear you now, ‘Oh, you’re just butthurt they have better lives than you!’ Even if that were true, that I was jealous or envious, those types of communications are boring af! Nobody’s life is that filtered. Nobody actually lives the Hallmark movies or bodice rippers they pretend to on social media.)
When facebook launched their ‘Real Name’ program and encouraged a bounty-hunting policy on users who dared to want to remain anonymous – it turned me off HARD and I deleted my account. Luckily for me, Twitter was getting more fun around this time. I “met” a group of people who liked Jamiroquai as much as my daughter and I did and that group had an expanded interface with other people who liked other similar things and Twitter became this Venn diagram of people in the UK, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, and the US who having never met in real life, became Twitter Friends.
When I was a child, teenager, and young mother, my grandmother used to send me, via USPS, thinking-of-you letters and cards containing newspaper clippings about archeological discoveries in Egypt because she knew I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt. Had she lived long enough, social media would have allowed her to do that and get my response within seconds. Which begs a question – would it have become too much noise? Was there something more special about a surprise note showing up in the mailbox one day than if she had sent me fifteen tweets, posts, grams, toks, or even texts every day? After 14 years of Twitter, my answer is, I really miss those surprise notes! They were random shots of happiness, rare enough to mean something instead of a carpet bombing of desperation that led to an unwanted obligation to respond or a sense of depression had they dried up. I wasn’t dependent on them, and yet they were each unique and specially curated to mean I felt loved in a way I didn’t know I needed to feel until I looked back on what they meant to me through the lens of time. The same can be said for phone calls. There was a time when getting a phone call was exciting! When using a payphone from work to check your messages and having your machine pick up after only one ring (meaning there was a message) could, in itself, give you a shot of glee because back then if your number was unlisted in the phonebook you only got calls from people to whom you gave your number and sometimes they were cute boys with a job and a car!
For a time, Twitter filled that void left when Grandma died and phone calls had lost their Schrodinger-esq anticipation. I was busy with life – mom, wife, dog parent, jobs, moving, cooking, cleaning, paying bills. But my Twitter Friends and I, we a fun bit of camaraderie and frivolousness. We played games via tweet, we had artistic scavenger hunts via tweet, we joked and talked and brought our spouses and kids into the fold with special online projects…Remember flash mobs? Twitter crushes? The thrill of a guitarist from a band you like following you back on #FollowFriday? People banding together during Hurricane Harvey to help the Cajun Navy pinpoint people and animals in need? But then it all started to change. What had been a useful, fun space became a nest of vipers. As Twitter became divided into factions - Red Twitter, Blue Twitter, “Journalist” Twitter, Gamer Twitter, Book Twitter, PC Twitter, Movie Twitter, Investment Twitter, and the like, my little group tore itself apart. The noise, the vitriol; the lack of basic humanity, accountability, and credibility that gets lost in anonymity turned Twitter (and other social media platforms) into nothing more than digital arenas for often involuntary gladiators to do battle or get assaulted – sometimes with real world consequences.
Look no further than today for an example. I wrote this post weeks ago and wasn’t going to ever upload it because no one cares, but I came back to it today because today was the day Silicon Valley Bank died and Twitter, in its current incarnation, played a part in its demise. Twitter heard about the Streisand Effect and told Babs to hold its beer. If Twitter were a person, it’d be that jerk in Human Resources who tells you the boss likes mayonnaise for his fries then tells everyone you’re sleeping together when you make sure to hand him mayonnaise packets with his lunch order. But Twitter isn't just one person in one company, it’s tens of millions of people who like to feel powerful, often by attacking and destroying others in bulk. When one guy can tell his fund members and friends to pull their money from a bank and it conveniently gets picked up by Twitter users, spreads like wild fire during a Santa Ana, and viola, a bank run and stock sell off occurs? When one man can destroy a bank via Twitter, we have a problem!!!
I don’t actually care about the bank. Its operators are a nest of zombie parasites that should have been removed from the banking system 15 years ago. What I do care about are the people impacted today – people who won’t get paid because their company’s payroll funds are gone, and who will spend the weekend, and maybe weeks, stressing about making rent or car payments. You see, people like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Hunter Biden can say, ‘Fuck it! I’m not paying my bills! I’m gonna do illegal drugs and lie!’ and no one bats an eye. Trump and Musk have basically told people to whom they owe money, ‘Eat a bag, SUCKERS!’ For Hunter Biden, paying taxes is apparently optional, getting a free pass for drug use that his daddy would demand others get locked up for is the norm, and lying to buy a hand gun is toats okay? Normal working-class people don’t have any of those luxuries. We have to pay our rent or we get evicted, we have to pay our bills or we get our cars repossessed and our FICO score goes down causing our borrowing costs to go up. We, as middle-class working-class Americans, have to obey every law and policy or we risk getting financially ruined or dead.
Our elected political representatives in the White House and Congress are, by and large, morons. Watching them question Jerome Powell, Matt Taibi, White House nominees, and corporate executives over the last few years has been a cringeworthy, eyerolling experience. Then watching them promote themselves on their social media accounts using snip-its from said events has exponentially increased the urge to crawl under the covers and come out after China has invaded or North Korea has bombed us – because that’s where we’re headed with this leadership, especially since it has this enormous voice that both rallies its hyper-divided minions to attack each other AND exposes the same “leaders” and “experts” as spineless, desperate, money grubbing ignoramuses who can be bought for a television spot. Waiting for this comatose posse to sack up and legislate any sort of accountability for internet technology-based companies is like waiting for a diamond to naturally erode.
We can’t put the skin back on the banana – once that natural seal is broken, all the sutures or glue in the world won’t stop the skin from breaking down and falling off the banana. We’ll never recapture the golden age of social media because we can never have an open, anonymous arena with rules of decorum or equality because someone will inevitably scream that their 1st Amendment rights are being trampled if they can’t call someone ugly or a bitch. Additionally, publicly traded internet technology-driven companies will never have the scruples required to run an ethically clean and cyber-secure company – doing those things diametrically conflicts with profit growth and the associated infinitely accelerating stock price growth required by corporate executives, Wall Street investors, and The Federal Reserve.
What we can do is create a platform structured to provide a specific service under certain rules that people can chose to adhere to or not be allowed to use the platform. We could create a platform that people like Zuckerberg don’t have the stones for because they’re money-addicted pimps selling the data of their brainwashed streetwalkers.
The first step is to decide what Twitter should be.
Back in the day, instead of starting with any sort of plan, the leaders, past and present, of Twitter (and all Social Media platforms for that matter) seem to have gotten high and/or drunk and tried to come up with slightly different ways to use the internet for its intended purpose – communication. There was no plan for facebook to be Old People’s Internet, Instagram to be the Internet for Paid Celebrity Influencers, The Tok to be Internet for Desperate People Seeking Attention at Any Cost (even if it means selling your soul to a foreign country with an agenda to destabilize the US, own all users’ data or, you know, track and kill people), and Twitter to be the Internet for The Self-Anointed Arbiters of The Association of The Intelligentsia. These platforms just kind of morphed into their niches organically. In the absence of true leaderships, the rules for each were written by the users with the most followers because somehow the number of anonymous digital followers one has equates to popularity and popularity equates to leadership in this and other physical or digital countries.
Social media as a business makes no sense. On these platforms, average users, real actual people, will buy or believe anything if a random, anonymous stranger with an arbitrarily-defined-as-sufficient, unvetted, unsubstantiated-as-actual-human-beings follower count tells them to. Corporations pay unholy amounts of money to buy the personal data of and market their products and services to galaxies of these nebulous users. All while “journalists” and their media-industry bosses use the platforms to generate clicks and user counts onto their own sites – for free. FREE!
Break it down like this… If someone walked up to you at the beach and said, “Hi, I have 3,000 imaginary friends. I bought info on you from TwitBookGramTok and I think you should totally buy Bytecoin and vote for Joe-Don Massengill and you should trust me based solely on how popular, as measured by my follower count, I am on such-and-such platform,” wouldn’t you get up, wrap your towel tightly around yourself, and move to another part of the beach much closer to the staffed Life Guard tower? If you owned a business and wanted to advertise your product or service to potential customers, would you give ten million dollars to some dude who said, “Hey, I have a network of one billion users of questionable legitimacy, I’ll fax-blast them for ya!”? And if you were the owner of a platform like say, The New York Times, would you give away inches of space in your paper, paying out of your own pocket to turn your paper into a daily-published, phonebook-sized tome of opinion pieces ranging from biased half-truths to total lies masquerading as “news”, and meanspirited attacks for attention – all for the financial or political benefit of others?
If any of those scenarios gave you pause, consider this…That’s literally all social media is these days.
You can fool yourself into thinking it’s a lifeline to news and information that helps you live your life – but it’s just not, not in its current form. By the time you see something on a social media platform it’s already happened – and social media platforms are far and away faster deliverers of goings-on than print and broadcast news sources. Sure, if you read hundreds of posts on dozens of social media streams all day you’ll be in the know about Taylor Swift concerts, movie spoilers, protests, and AOC’s latest post – but will you have time to work, care for your children and pets, and NOT crash your car? You seriously have to read ALL the noise just to ferret out the crap you might care about, and by the time you read it, it’s too late anyway. Another school shooting has happened and all you can do is tweet, “Thoughts and Prayers”. Just so we’re clear, that’s not “doing something”. “Doing something” would be taking a long hard look at the root problems in our society, asking yourself how you can change them, and doing it. Tweeting #BLM or #TimesUp or #MeToo or #GunControl hasn’t actually changed anything – People of all ages, races, religions, genders, etc. are still being abused and murdered daily.
A long time ago, way back in the 20th century, we didn’t have the endless cacophony of social media and yet we still heard about concerts, political malfeasance, corporate corruption, natural disasters, war, and protests. Funny thing is, now, in the 21st century, with all the 24/7 news, tweets, posts, reddits, grams, toks, toots, texts, signals, and whatevers – the world has just become a shittier place. Knowing about Breonna Taylor didn’t save George Floyd, protesting about George Floyd didn’t save Amir Locke or Tyre Nichols. Hearing about endless school shootings hasn’t changed a single thing about school shootings except for an increase in their frequency. Hearing about never-ending political foot dragging, congressionally-enabled corporate greed and environmental destruction, and societally baked-in bigotry hasn’t led to anything but exponentially worse conduct by all parties.
So, what do we do? We make a plan. Instead of being trapped in an endless emotional vortex of fury, sadness, and hopelessness; bouncing like a pinball between bumpers of fear, oppression, and being shouted at while having our voices stolen…let’s decide that one area of the internet will not suck. Let’s decide that it will give us hope, factual knowledge, supportive community, and maybe some fun. Let’s force it to provide common ground upon which we can stand together rather than allowing it to isolate us.
What does Twitter need to be to accomplish this?
Twitter needs to be the eye of the hurricane. While the chaos swirls around us, we need to know there is one calm place we can go to get the information we need and the humanity we deserve.
How do we do that?
Twitter becomes a 510(c)(3) entity. It converts to a non-profit corporation, an international public service provider, held to a standard of ethics that would make Jimmy Carter proud. But what about all the debt Elon took on to fund the purchase you scream, what of the poor investors and bankers you wail? Let them claim the funds they put up to take the company private were donations to an entity registered as a non-profit – they can take the tax write-off and hush!
Then what?
Then the actual hard work.
First, a code of ethics and standards that includes a rock-solid oath to never share or sell user data to anyone unless it’s a law enforcement matter and properly issued search warrants have been executed. Twitter will vow to protect free speech as long as it is civil. Twitter cannot be the arbiter of fact vs. fiction, but it can be a platform where lies are exposed and hard questions are debated. If someone wants to try to argue that vaccines/electric cars/fire flies are hokum, they’re entitled to bring data and let the world decide for themselves. Twitter will pledge to eject any user found to be a bully and report the activity to the appropriate authorities if it’s criminal in nature. We all know what bullying behavior looks like so just stop with your lamentations about “grey areas” or “freedom of speech”. There’s never any need to mock or attack people’s grammar, bodies, race, religion, gender, vocal ability, fashion sense, or pet choice. Doxxing people, sniping people, dog piling on people you disagree with or just like torturing for fun isn’t accomplishing anything and none of it belongs on Twitter. For the love of chocolate sauce and whipped cream, stop being DICKS! You can kindly point out, in a private DM perhaps, “Hey, you probably meant “in arrears” instead of “in the rears”,” if you earnestly think the person doesn’t know the difference and you want to help them avoid future embarrassment, but there’s no need to call them stupid or publicly shame them or fire up your flying monkeys to swarm their notifications with nasty comments just because you’re an “author” and feel entitled to being a DICK.
So, to recap, Twitter will abide by the following:
The No Scrubs Rule (Hat Tip to TLC) - No scraping and selling or sharing user data without legal cause.
The Don’t Be A Dick Rule – Free CIVILIZED Speech is protected, abuse is not. Abusers, and by extension, those inciting abuse, will not be tolerated. Period. It really is that easy. If a user can’t politely and clearly make a point or respond to a user they can go use facebook or another platform because it won’t be tolerated on Twitter – by the users. All the social media companies claim to have moderators who police the platforms, but we’ve all seen how effective they aren’t. They’re biased. They let a lot slide for a lot of reasons – political allegiances, click counts and user interaction, job security, stock grant income, you name it. It’s up to users to freeze out the Dicks. It’s up to users to take a beat and ask, “Hey, is this poster being a shit and should I elevate their tweet?” before “liking” or retweeting something and if it’s offensive, take the initiative to block them from your feed. I’ve never understood when the shift happened wherein humans abrogated their responsibility to self-moderate and to do their part to hold the herd in check. I grew up in a time when if you were being a Dick, someone called you out and you either cut it out and apologized or you got frozen out of the circle. Even on the internet in the early days I got schooled on being a Dick. Circa 1995 I had a Prodigy account and while in a chat with a group of people about Prince songs, I corrected someone’s spelling of your/you’re (or they’re/there/their – I can’t remember). I grew up with a family that corrected those things so you didn’t go out into the world and make an ignorant ass of yourself. To me it was a politeness to say ‘Hey, I think you meant “you’re”, but I got my ass handed to me. I was, as they say, FLAMED, and left the platform. I learned that day, that in some cases, the internet obliterates both tone and intent. I hadn’t meant to offend, I thought I was being helpful, and then the world went en fuego for a brief few minutes while dozens of people electronically shouted at me for being a “Grammar Nazi” until one user said something to the effect of, ‘Just ignore the asshole (meaning me).’ and the group did. That was it. I was shunned. Today that behavior is just a way of life on the internet. It’s a heaving mass of people trying to be helpful and people being jerks. I often reflect on what might have been the outcome of that evening if the person who’d made the error had just said, “Oh crap! Thanks! Missed that.” like I would have if a friend or teacher had found a similar error in an essay. Something shifted in the late ‘90s early 2000s and I didn’t get the memo. Suddenly school kids couldn’t have Christmas parties or even holiday parties, they couldn’t have cupcakes in school for birthdays or have a private party without inviting the whole class. Women were expected to be offended by male flirtation in all instances, drop off their kids at daycare when they were six weeks old, and Farberize them by four weeks old. White people couldn’t publicly listen to rap music and schools desegregated as busses were decommissioned. Where the ‘70s and ‘80s had been about live and let live (at least amongst my generation who literally gave no shits about whether people were gay or straight or Black or White or Asian – all we cared about was who had wheels and could get us to the garage party where someone was spinning records and someone’s mom had scored wine coolers and beer) – the ‘90s and ‘00s became about attacking EVERYONE while simultaneously playing victim. At some point, the internet magnified this cultural shift and everyone became a judgmental Dick. All of the fighting about gender, gaming, who can listen to what music – it all serves two purposes. #1) It keeps us too busy fighting over little things so as to #2) obscure the real crimes being perpetrated. Why does it matter if someone wants to be a certain gender or none at all? Why can’t I listen to Baby It’s Cold Outside if I don’t read offense into the lyrics? Who gives a rip if girls want to play video games???? Especially if while everyone is fighting over who can use a certain bathroom, children are getting shot in school, women are having rights over their own bodies stolen from them, and politicians are kneeling on the necks of 99% of Americans. If Twitter could offer a space where people can just politely be themselves – that’d be fantastic. And we might find a lot of common ground whereby we could, oh I don’t know, change some shit?
Next, a code of conduct will be agreed to by every user.
Call it the Cary Grant/Betty White Rule – if Cary Grant or Betty White wouldn’t have said it or done it, it doesn’t fly. If a user can’t have an articulate, civilized conversation with someone; or just remain silent in the presence of someone they know they will never agree with – they don’t belong on Twitter. If you need to swear, don’t do it to degrade, threaten, bully, or otherwise abuse someone – do it because it suits the situation. Elevate your discourse, find your swagger, class up the joint. Don’t be crass or a cad, it’s beneath you and accomplishes nothing. You need to educate someone on a topic they woefully misunderstand? Do it without condescension, snark, threats, abuse, or unleashing your hoard of followers to attack them on your behalf. You want to confront someone with whom you disagree on a visceral level? Take a beat and pretend you’re in public at a coffee shop filled with cops, cameras, and litigators and address your opponent accordingly. You have strong feelings about the legality of abortion or wearing white after Labor Day? Fantastic. You don’t get to walk up and punch someone in the face IRL, and you don’t get to do it on Twitter. Any more. But you can, passionately and intelligently and factually, lay out your argument without fear of reprisal. If the other party can’t handle your truth – that’s on them, you’ve done all you can; and hopefully in articulating your case, others will see your words and learn from them or respond and add to the discourse.
Then there’s the list of platform tweaks:
Since Twitter will now be a non-profit, it’ll be funded by donations.
Going forward, you’d have to think of The Twitter as a town square or a city park. It’s open to the public for free to use for picnics, walks, or marriage proposals. It’s maintained by paid employees who specialize in landscaping, architecture maintenance, and community interaction. There’s a bulletin board upon which the local leaders post notices about park maintenance schedules, disaster preparedness recommendations, community assistance providers, and special events. It’s those special events that bring in the funds needed to really keep the place interesting and well maintained. Every day there’s a different event on the grounds or a combination of events – a book fair, a pet fair, a job fair, a school carnival, a winter festival, a summer movie in the park, a spring fling, a taste of the town food fest, a Halloween monster-mash, a crafting shindig, an art show, a square dance rap-a-thon…you get the idea.
The Town Square Financial System works thusly – sellers of wares, employers looking for workers, organizations looking to raise funds or awarenesses, etc. pay to set up booths, food carts, and what have you. The public comes out in droves for each free-to-enter event, usually getting some free trinket like a canvas shopping bag or free comic book upon entry with the understanding they will probably spend money once inside.
Twitter could be our digital town square, the city park, the Glastonbury field if you will. In the real world; the town, the city, the Michael Eavis don’t let the event organizers and participants use their facilities for free and neither should Twitter. If someone wants to hawk their wares, raise funds for their organization, or promote their media outlet & “journalists” – they should have to pay to use Twitter’s field and to gain access to Twitter’s Rolodex of the population willing to come to the field and spend their money and time.
This notion that Twitter should be free for everyone, including the people using its enormous reach to make piles of money, is a problem. First of all, it’s a lie. Nothing is free. As users, we’re paying in ways that are both creepy and exploitive. Twitter makes money selling our time and our data – our behavior, our location, our activity, our personal information, our words, to anyone with cash. Secondly, research indicates that “the top 25% of Twitter users by tweet volume produce 97% of all tweets…”2 which is to say, 75% of us users have no voice on this platform. We’re being constantly shouted at by mega users whose tweet volume is directly correlated to their follower count and it’s getting old. At this rate, I don’t see why 75% of Twitter users would want to come to the field anymore because what’s the point? The 25% are so busy firing bollocks at each other, shouting insults at us peons, and generally being lame – all for free (until the recent $8/mo Blue Tick fee that may or may not apply to all). I for one have dusted off my DVD player to stay home watching old movies and reminiscing about the days before “smart” phones when Jewell sang at coffee shops while people played checkers with actual gameboards and plastic discs. Getting abused or ignored on Twitter isn’t fun. The information it provides isn’t useful to me. What’s the point? I quit Twitter nearly a year ago.
So, here’s the thing you 25%-ers – New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, Wall Street Journal, EVERY POLITICAN EVER, Paramount, HBO, Ford, VW, Taylor Swift, Inc., Literary agents, Book publishers, Authors, Crypto Creators, and various “experts” – it’s pay-to-play time, only we’re going to call it a tax-deductible donation. You can “buy” a Twitter table for your corporation and let some of your employees use it, you can rent a booth at Twitter.com and peddle your baubles and “expert” opinions, or you can sod off to one of Meta’s platforms or TikTok or a Mastodon Instance.
Additionally, Twitter can offer “Fundraisers” to us lower 75%. Let’s say you want to send a shout out to that special someone on her 18th birthday, an old-school song-dedication-on-the-radio like we used to do back before the internet ruined everything fun – you can donate a few bucks and have your dedication promoted for an hour by Twitter itself – right to the top of everyone’s trending list and have said special someone’s own tweets rain glitter next time they use the platform. I don’t know, but you get the idea.
The rest of the nuts and bolts work like this…
#1 A “More” button after 140 or 280 characters. Jack Dorsey should have done this YEARS ago, but he was so hung up on the microblog thing as his unique niche vs. traditional blogs, facebook posts, Instagram photos, Vine videos, and Reddit groups to realize how important being able to write an actual coherent thought is! One tweet will be now be 1000 characters (or more?) including spaces without deductions for photos (4) or a link to source material (e.g. website proving point), and to prevent longer tweets from funking up timelines, there will be a convenient MORE button added after 140 or 280 characters so that interested parties can read the rest of the story and those who aren’t can skim right past – just like they do with advertisers promoted tweets (I mean come on! Do people actually read those things? When I still used the platform I could spot them and roll right by without engaging – I couldn’t name one advertiser on the platform.)
#2 No more publicly-viewable follower/following lists – this isn’t high school, we don’t need this to be a popularity contest. Account holders will be able to see their followers and those they follow because they’ll need that access for account maintenance and Direct Messages – but other users need to stop being brainwashed into thinking that seeing an account with a bunch of anonymous followers equals trustworthiness, legitimacy, and/or value of opinion.
#3 One free tweet per day for private citizens. If you’re an average user, someone who’s on Twitter to follow your favorite wildlife photographer or to keep in touch with friends in far-away locations, enjoy one free Tweet every day courtesy of Twitter. Outside of that, you can make a donation for a block of anytime tweets, or donate for a Fundraiser shout out.
One Tweet A Day should keep the Busy Bots and Bees away. All the noise generated by users running multiple bot accounts will die down if they have to start paying to send out their trolling garbage. All the noise generated by people who just get off on abusing people, or who spend their day desperately trying to get someone famous to follow them or gain fame through abusing someone famous will settle down.
#4 Unlimited free tweets for government agencies and emergency service providers whose accounts are solely used to provide public service announcements and/or factual data. Think National Weather Service, CalFire, USGS, FEMA, schools (closures/alerts), military (local maneuver alerts, etc.), law enforcement (evacuations/road closures/Amber and Silver alerts/noteworthy apprehensions), the CDC, The White House (only if used to communicate facts/alerts – no more using this account for grossly incompetent politicians to promote self-congratulatory half-truths!), select non-profits (e.g. Animal rescues), etc. The bedrock of the argument for the importance of platforms like Twitter (and specifically Twitter’s tax-exempt, non-profit status) is their ability to reach large swaths of the planet with vital information. One of Twitter’s main objectives should be to provide a clear channel for life-saving communications vs its current cacophony of users trying frantically to go viral.
#5 Which leaves us with politicians and their numerous organizations, corporations including media outlets, certain non-profits, and professionals – all your “authors”, “journalists”, agents, “experts”, celebrities, podcasters, etc. Generally speaking, anyone whose profile bio is promoting something they want to get paid for, whose tweets are flogging something that’s making money for themselves or their bosses or their organization – they can make donations that allow them to make a certain number of tweets. $100 gets you 25 anytime tweets? $500 gets you a fancy badge or crown or whatever for your profile and 25 tweets? $10,000 gets you 25 tweets and an ad for your new same-as-everyone-else’s SUV crossover pinned to the top of everyone’s timeline for 2 hours? Again, I don’t know, but you get the idea.
It’s time for Twitter to set itself apart from the other platforms. Let the other platforms be the angry, heaving free-for-alls where people go to be made to feel like garbage and get riled up by anonymous digital strangers looking to manipulate them.
2012 was the Golden Age of Twitter. It’s time for Twitter to reclaim its place as an international community builder, one where people can meet, discuss, and learn from each other about good music, good food, and good deeds. It’s time to reset Twitter back to a time before it was taken over by hordes of politicians, “journalists”, “influencers”, investors, “experts”, “movement” organizers, and the literati. It’s time to demand that the biggest users cut down on the volume of noise they produce so other voices can be heard. It’s time to bring some silence and dignity back to Twitter.
Or we could just rename it Turdster and post poop emojis all day.
1 Nothing is free, especially on the internet. You’re either paying for the service, getting your data and personal information scraped to pay for the service, or a combination of both.
2 10 Facts about Americans and Twitter. Pew Research Center. 5 May 2022. Online.
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