Omair Ahmad 
It is hard to follow the latest on the destruction of Twitter. Is it the marking of National Public Radio as a “state-affiliated” news organisation, or the banning of Substack links – leading to a tearful separation by Musk fanboy, Matt Taibi? Or is it the weird way that people who have not paid for the verified blue check handles now have their accounts labelled as maybe paid, maybe legacy, as long as they are not The New York Times?
The constant drama makes it hard to understand what is happening, or why. It is not helped by the fact that Twitter now responds to questions from journalists with a poop emoji, and everybody rushes to report this even though such a juvenile action is largely inconsequential to the lives and decisions of most people.
The confusion also leads to people trying to explain decisions as part of a psychoanalysis of Musk – whether he is some unfathomable genius, or a man-child throwing tantrums. In real terms, this is about as useful as analysing a character on a long running TV serial. There would be nothing wrong with this if actions on Twitter were as inconsequential to the lives of people as a TV serial, but – other than for a few obsessive fans – this is untrue. Twitter mattered for specific reasons, and the destruction of its value matters not just to the people who use (or used) it.
In his excellent 2008 book, Flat Earth News, the long-time Guardian journalist Nick Davies had tried to examine the problems affecting journalism. While the book is worth reading as a whole, his core conclusions were that the increasing corporatisation of the media meant that there were fewer journalists in fewer locations with fewer times to do actual reporting, while PR and propaganda – by corporations and governments – had grown by leaps and bounds.
Also read: How Trolls and Hate-Mongers Are Taking Advantage of Changed Rules on Twitter
With journalists segregated to bigger cities, there was little time or opportunity to build contacts, find verifiable sources, or provide in-depth analysis. At the same time, the pressure of the near constant news cycle forced the production of “content”, leading to the recycling of what was essentially PR or propaganda that had been insufficiently vetted, or as he called it, “churn-alism”. The core job of journalism is to better inform the public of what is happening, so that the public can make informed decisions. With the lack of a wider and deeper knowledge of events happening at a distance, journalists were often failing in their core duty of reliably reporting what the actual situation was.
When Davies was visiting Mumbai in 2015 to take part in a panel discussion on the issue of covering terrorism (one of the areas where propaganda goes largely unchecked), I asked him about possible solutions. This was an area that his book had been somewhat weak on. In person, Davies was as glum in his assessment, seeing little hope of substantial improvement. I regret that I did not ask him about the use of social media – specifically Twitter – in this regard, because Twitter did provide something of a workaround to this problem.
While the problems of underpaid journalists and local bureaus being shut down in smaller cities and towns was in no way solved by Twitter, it did offer a crucial resource to journalists – that of potential verified sources and colleagues that they could reach out to. It also offered a near-instantaneous opportunity for those with more information, or different information, to rebut or add to reportage. So much so that many news media normalised embedding tweets in their reports.
I wish to stress that this was a workaround. It did not so much solve the problem, as find a way to deal with it imperfectly. For example, because much of the content was in English, and a large part of the user base was in the US, America-based journalists in what is incorrectly called the “international media” had a distinct advantage, and also large blind spots. In India, where less than 25 million, or just about 1.6% of people, are on Twitter, it meant that the vast majority of the population was both inaccessible, or itself had limited ways to access, journalists via Twitter. The discussions on Twitter, as important as they might have seemed to politicians, celebrities, academics and journalists, probably mattered little at all to most Indians. Nonetheless, even this 25 million was a large improvement to the few dozen contacts that a journalist could have phoned, or the few hundred that they could have emailed.
Musk’s acquisition of, and his decisions after taking over, Twitter have severely disrupted this – although more in the US than anywhere else. By making payment the most important criteria for verification, Twitter has severely undermined the reliability of what it means to be verified. By alleging that NPR, which receives about 1% of its funds from government sources, is “government affiliated”, and by removing the verified status from NYT, and by suggesting that legacy verifications could be paid verifications, Twitter has made the job of journalists looking for trusted sources, and a public that wishes to find verifiable sources, that much harder.
Also read: ‘Either Our People Go to Prison, or We Comply With Laws’: Elon Musk on Indian Social Media Rules
The question is, as the Roman senator put in so many centuries ago, cui bono, who benefits? When the media loses its ability to offer verifiable, trusted information, the public loses its ability to judge the actions of the powerful – particularly governments and large corporations. For Musk, a businessman whose companies are critically reliant on government subsidies (pegged at $4.9 billion in 2015 by the LA Times), maybe it is a tad uncomfortable to have such public scrutiny. Especially so when his actions as a businessman have led to charges of exploitation, sexism, racism and much more.
Musk bagged the title of being the world’s richest man because of compensation from these companies, not from his rather juvenile use of Twitter. The money he used to buy Twitter is largely not his own, and even if the company filed for bankruptcy, he would likely lose little in comparison to the profits made by the rest of his corporate holdings. The fact that he may wish to severely cripple and undermine the reputation of investigative media houses while his core wealth comes under scrutiny is a far more powerful explanation of his actions than whether he is an egotistical, incompetent snowflake. (To be fair, there is no reason why both explanations cannot be true.)
More importantly, the destruction of the value of Twitter for journalists should, once again, force us to consider the reasons that the Fourth Estate is failing to live up to its duties, and what might be necessary to make sure countries have a well-informed citizenry. It is obvious that a for-profit, ad-driven, social media space was, at best, a temporary jury-rig that allowed us to ignore the deeper problems faced by journalists and citizens at large.