Anger management: New Twitter CEO needs to make platform less hostile

December 4, 2021

When the CEO of a major company steps down, there’s usually a clear and obvious reason: sometimes scandal, often shareholder revolt — or more simply, that after amassing billions, it’s just time.

In the case of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, however, there seems to be a different reason: his heart just didn’t seem to be in it any more.

Dorsey, who announced his exit from Twitter this week — and whose public persona over the past few years has morphed into more a New Age, crypto-obsessed yoga fan than a tech CEO — also runs financial company Square, and many in the company felt his focus on Twitter was insufficient. While Twitter itself remains important, the company has been on an unsteady course, failing to do much to grow or tackle the many challenges of an acrimonious platform.

The question, then, as new CEO Parag Agrawal steps in, is what Twitter needs to do to ameliorate what has become, for better or worse, the closest thing to an online public square. What seems key for Twitter is twofold: first, to make itself more useful to everyday people; but perhaps more importantly, find new ways to clamp down on the bitter, angry, inflammatory culture that seems to have become endemic to the platform.

One should be clear that Twitter is never going to replace Facebook: your dad or your aunt will never turn to a social-information site in order to connect with people. It is also completely dwarfed by other social-media platforms. Twitter sits at a comparatively meagre 315 million users on the site daily, while Facebook has nearly 10 times as much. To try and narrow that gap seems futile.

What Twitter has rather remarkably done, however, is to become the place people go to both find out what is happening and debate the issues of the day. The platform has become the go-to home for journalists, writers, media figures, or people who simply wish to shoot the breeze and make jokes in a public way. If you want to be plugged in to the world and culture, you don’t turn to Instagram or Facebook; you log on to Twitter.

However, Twitter abides by the classic “one per cent rule” of the internet: a tiny fraction of people are responsible for the bulk of content and most people just lurk. That is a problem for a company looking to grow.

Despite some steps made by the site — curating tweets instead of presenting them in chronological order; showing trending topics, if often clumsily — Twitter is still an overwhelming place for newcomers. While for expert users it is a great place to learn both the news and what people are saying about it, for new users it is a miasma of in-jokes, niche cultural expectations, and a flood of information, the quality of which is hard to parse.

Agrawal’s task is thus to make Twitter’s vitality as a source of information for its core users available to all. That will likely involve more and better human curation, more accessible onboarding, and a focus and marketing push to get people to think of Twitter as the place to go for news and discussion.

But before that can happen, the nature of discussion also needs to be tackled. While Twitter of course cannot single-handedly tackle the deep polarization of contemporary societies, certain features of the site do lend themselves to bad-faith interpretations, drive-by condemnation and a bitter tone.

The ability to “quote tweet” — adding commentary to another’s tweet — very often results in blunt, frequently unfair interpretation, quashing conversation rather than encouraging it. It also cultivates a culture of people talking past one another.

Maybe more importantly, Twitter has yet to deal with two key problems: context collapse; and the tension between ephemerality and permanence.

Context collapse is the problem that arises when differing groups and interpretive frameworks try to engage online with the same thing. The result — at best miscommunication, at worst deep offence — is something that could be mitigated by an ability to limit tweets to particular groups, or perhaps only those who ask for them.

The other issue is that while a record of statements is sometimes useful, very often tweets — which can be small, throwaway thoughts — have no reason to be made permanent. While Twitter tried an ill-fated experiment with vanishing posts called Fleets, there is no default way to have tweets delete, or choose certain ones to disappear.

Those oversights reflect a product and a platform that has for too long languished, and been unresponsive to the needs of both its current and new users. Dorsey’s heart may have never been in it, but if Twitter is to find a more stable footing, Agrawal is going to have give it not just effort but, more importantly, a commitment to building a platform which cultivates a culture of communication, rather than the anger that so predominates now.

Navneet Alang is a Toronto-based freelance contributing technology columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @navalang

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