Twitter has long positioned itself as the “global town square” in which the world comes together to have a shared conversation across geographic and cultural boundaries. Such was the early vision of last decade's social platforms, that they would bring us together as a society and overcome the ability of elites to dictate the global conversation. Instead, even as Twitter’s CEO touted his company’s global reach in 2013, the platform’s growth had leveled off and over the half-decade since, Twitter has shrunk almost in half, shed its vaunted geotagged resolution, centralized around an ever-older set of elite accounts and transitioned from a place to hear from the world to a place to retweet from afar. What does this mean for the future of the global town square?
The great dream of social media was that it would give everyone a voice. From heads of state to ordinary citizens, everyone, no matter where they lived, what they looked like, what their background or place in society was, would be equal. Most importantly, these social platforms would be free to publish to and consume and would not preference the wealthy and powerful over the traditionally disenfranchised.
Elites would no longer control the global conversation. We would finally have our long-elusive vision of communicative democracy.
Instead, as our social platforms have matured, they have increasingly reverted back to the centralization and elite control of every other form of media that preceded them. Worse, they have emboldened and empowered repressive governments throughout the world to use them to censor speech and surveil their citizenry. They have undermined democracy, flooded us with fake news and contributed to genocide. They have even normalized an entire planet to the idea of a privacy-free future in which surveillance and the commercial trade of our intimate physical and digital information is simply a way of life.
Twitter was long the exception among its peers. While most other platforms focused on facilitating private communication, Twitter fashioned itself as a global marketplace of ideas in which messages were sent to the world and shared publicly by default. This relentless chronological firehose was imagined as something that could finally level the playing field for everyone.
It seems such a dream was not to be.
In the place of this utopian dream is a town square that is shrinking by the day. From a peak of more than half a billion tweets a day to just over 300 million a day as of October of last year, Twitter has shrunk precipitously. Its user base is steadily aging without a sufficient influx of new users, meaning it is becoming increasingly insular.
Most importantly, even as Twitter has shrunk, it has steadily transitioned from a place where people came together to talk about their own beliefs, narratives, ideas and experiences into one where they merely share the thoughts of others from afar.
As Twitter is increasingly becoming an insular and ever-shrinking community where people come to retweet the posts of others, especially elites, what does this mean for the future of social media?
We are hearing less and less from ordinary people across the world telling us their thoughts and livestreaming their experiences.
Even our ability to put those remaining experiences on a map is shrinking rapidly as users are less and less willing to share their locations and those that do choose to report only city-level resolution.
Twitter is the only major social media platform that offers an easily accessible realtime firehose of itself. That firehose makes it possible to uncover the trends we didn’t know to look for. Facebook and Instagram force us to know what we are looking for and even then restrict us from accessing it all.
As Twitter shrinks, centralizes and transitions from a content to an attentional platform, where will we turn for insights into our global world?
Is the promise of social media as a “social radar” offering GPS-tagged realtime events and narratives from across the planet coming to a close?
Twitter’s decline is slow enough that it is not in danger of disappearing anytime soon, but the signal it provides us about the world has changed dramatically.
Putting this all together, the early dream of Twitter as a global town square in which ordinary people would share their GPS-tagged experiences in realtime is fading. In its place, Twitter is becoming a traditional broadcast medium in which ordinary people merely rebroadcast the same elites as always. In the end, the more the web matures, the more it becomes just like that which came before.
