Peter Kafka, Chief Correspondent covering media and technology
- Twitter has remained sticky under Elon Musk, even for the kinds of people who don’t feel great about Elon Musk owning Twitter.
- Joe Biden posting his election drop-out note to Twitter doesn’t prove the point.
- But the fact that pundits like Ezra Klein are still there — or were there recently — speaks volumes.
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On the one hand: Not at all.
The value of the thing Musk bought is a fraction of what he paid for it because it depends on advertising, and advertisers don’t want to go near it because Musk keeps doing Musk things on it. Like calling for the execution or imprisonment of people who don’t support legislation he likes, or obsessing about the race of actors who play cartoon characters. That’s not going to change because Musk doesn’t seem capable of or interested in changing.
On the other hand: A bit? Measured by vibes, at least?
As my colleague Hasan Chowdhury notes, Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race on Sunday by posting a note on Twitter/X, which delighted Musk to no end. But Biden, like a lot of social media users, is a promiscuous poster: The same message went out on Threads and Instagram. (Reminder: Twitter is much, much smaller than platforms like Instagram and TikTok.)
A more meaningful sign has been the way people who aren’t the president of the United States have been using Twitter in recent months, as the news cycle roared into unprecedented territory again: They showed up to crack wise, argue, and even share useful information.
And the most telling sign, to me, was the re-appearance of Ezra Klein. The New York Times columnist and podcaster (who was also my colleague at Vox Media for years) stopped posting on Twitter in October 2022 — just before Musk finalized his acquisition. But he returned earlier this month, amid the swirl of will-he/won’t he around Biden.
What I’m hearing from congressional Democrats about President Biden is this: He has done nothing to allay their fears. But his defiance — and fury — has been enough to stay their hand.
This is arguably the worst of all worlds: Democrats realize they are drifting toward a grim…
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) July 11, 2024
And then he was off and running. Just like the old days, peppering the platform with a mix of takes, retweets, and really useful reported analysis:
Where things stand:
1. Top Dems who believed even a week ago Biden would stay now believe he’ll go.
2. House and Senate Dems have lost faith in his ability to win and there’s no way to win them back. His calls and interviews have hurt him badly. Confirmed debate wasn’t a…
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) July 18, 2024
Again: Klein has a column and a popular podcast at The New York Times, with all of the reach and clout that entails. In February, when he used his podcast to argue that Biden should step out of the race, and then explained how that might happen, it roiled the political establishment.
Now here he was, just like everyone else. Posting and scrolling. What happened? Why did he come back, and is he sticking around?
I asked him, via email. Here’s his response, in full:
“It’s true that I was off Twitter for two years, then back for a few weeks, and am back off of it now. For me, Twitter is a kind of trade-off: When I use it, I’m more plugged-in to rapidly shifting waves of sentiment, and less able to think clearly, deeply and independently. If I’d been on Twitter intensely in February, I’m not sure I’d have done my original series on why Biden should step aside. But the past few weeks have really required plugging in to rapidly shifting waves of sentiment! I try to see it as a tool. I don’t think it’s good for the way I think most of the time. But there are moments when you need to think that way.
I do think you see something else here: Threads said they didn’t want to be the place for news, and boy, did they get their wish.”
A couple notes here:
- The person who leaves Twitter and comes back and feels ambivalent about it and says they are leaving again is very, very relatable.
- I was asking Klein about the reason he was posting on Twitter — as a creator. But he talked about it more as a Twitter consumer — getting “plugged in.” The truth is that for many of the most hard-core Twitter people, it’s a mix of both — absorbing what people are posting and occasionally responding to it. (The overwhelming majority of Twitter users, like all social media users, rarely post, if ever — something every social media platform is familiar with but seemed to be news to Musk until he bought the site.)
- I have a lot of problems with Threads, but I spent time there on Sunday, and it was not a news-free zone, at all. But I still spent more time on Twitter.
Ultimately, I think the correct way to describe Twitter’s current status is less of a full-blown revival and more of a time-based uptick — the way news channels like CNN will see a spike around big events, then sink down to modest ratings when things settle down. Which was always one of the core pitches for Twitter to begin with.
Which means we’re really talking about a status quo. For a relatively small number of people, Twitter was useful, entertaining, and addictive before Musk bought it. And it remains so, despite … everything.
I don’t think that’s what Musk thought he was buying two years ago, and I don’t feel great about using it myself. But I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
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