Twitter's value was always community, not speech

Elon's about to get a $44 billion education into what users love about Twitter. His ability to grasp that and make good policy will determine whether the bird app thrives or collapses.

“A scary picture about Twitter being ruined” generated by DALL-E 2 on OpenAI.

I wanted to send out some thoughts about this new era for Twitter now that the sale has closed, using and expanding on a thread I wrote on Twitter today. I wrote a newsletter edition earlier this week about what I think is going on with social media in general, but I want to focus on what’s at risk for Twitter this time.

I've been rereading The Cluetrain Manifesto for a separate project the past week. It's a seminal work about the architecture of the internet for those of us who've been around the block, and I still assign this book to my seniors because I don't want it to get lost in the march of time.

Cluetrain is something everyone should read, given how much we use this wonderful invention without often stopping to think much about how it all works at a structural level. It was written in the late '90s, and the ideas feel somewhat given now, but at the time the authors were describing a new age defined by this new and fundamentally different form of media. The examples are dated, and many of the predictions have come to pass (thus the tendency to wave the book away as Captain Obvious). But the bones beneath all that meat are the real gem of the book because to understand it is to understand some fundamental truths about the way the Internet itself works, and that gives you tremendous insight into seeing the future when products come and go.

Cluetrain's most famous feature is its 95 Theses, a list-form argument that when read together offers a narrative understanding of what was about to change. I discovered the theses when I read Dan Gillmor’s We The Media as a grad student pup and he referenced Thesis 1: "Markets are conversations." It set my mind on a journey that defined a lot of my future scholarship. Understanding that buying and selling—of ideas, of products, of most anything—is about relationships alters the way you see online life. New connections forged by online tools, and without the permission of our minders, enable new types of community and exchange.

The argument in Cluetrain is elegant. The internet, unlike other media forms we'd known to date (think newspapers, TV, radio, books), represented something structurally new. Unlike other legacy media built upon a model of top-down distribution of content, the essence of the internet was a networked conversation. People aren't passive users. They're makers, sharers, readers, and watchers. Interaction became a characteristic in media use, something we had never had before. And it unlocked a whole other way of doing things we see as fundamental to being in a society.

The reason I'm thinking about that today is that there is a type of regression to the mean that has happened with a lot of our media the past 20 years, one that forgets the lessons of Cluetrain. What I’m speaking of is an overfocus on mere content.

When the Cluetrain guys said "markets are conversations," they were comparing the vibrant life of the internet to a bustling market in the real world. It's a messy place full of debate, exchange, some arguing, and so forth. But the consumer's choice is centered.

We get something extraordinarily wrong in our discourse about platforms when we singularly focus on free expression. It's not that this isn't important. I like free speech. Apparently so does Elon. But a platform structured entirely around unrestrained expression while ignoring the real connections those messages travel on ignores the truth of Thesis 1. You end up with people shouting into the void but nothing that encourages listening and good-faith conversation. You cannot build community.

In 2022, probably due to the political environment, we speak of our social products almost exclusively in terms of speech and give much less attention to the parasocial interaction enabled by that speech. Speech rules are fundamental to building community, yes, but it also means that bad rules and no standards can tear down community. That is, we go too hard on stumping for speech without talking about listening. Conversation implies exchange, back-and-forth, and consideration of other views. Changing our dang minds after hearing from someone not like us.

What we are talking about is the benefit that comes from speech rooted in good community. Even the vaunted Marketplace Of Ideas implies that it’s a dialogue, not just people airing their views and not responding in a meaningful and human way. And yet the speech side of the ledger is the one we seem to worry most about. What good is free speech if nobody is really listening?

I've invoked the word “community” several times this week in reference to the Twitter sale. I don't worry much about my right to free expression there because I have a lot of other channels on which to write and get out my ideas. Incidentally, so do all the people concern trolling about free speech. The truth is that deplatforming people for content violations gets framed as limiting their right to speak, but really what’s happening is a limit on distribution. People can post elsewhere, but violating community rules comes at the cost of not being able to use that community to spread your words. As it should be. Communities have rules, and free expression appropriately comes with social costs.

Tech companies have created vast platforms that have consolidated our digital lives into a dwindling number of spaces, and those platforms are constantly underlining their bona fides about expression. But the real thing that makes these places take off is community. It’s not the speech, it’s the people. You can like the speech in a place all you like, but if you don’t like the people you’re going to find a new community. Social links between us turn those individual acts of expression into a conversation when the latter is fostered. That, my friends, is where you get a marketplace of ideas. Not just with speech, but by speech that honors exchange and interaction and builds trust between members.

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I'll say a thing about Elon that is perhaps controversial. He isn't going to ruin this community, because the truth is Twitter's prior leadership gave scant attention to community problems users have been complaining about for 10 years. Elon’s reign could be quite bad, don’t get me wrong. But it's not like things were great before.

It’s a testament to the people, the ones that represent Twitter’s secret sauce, that users stuck around despite the rampant abuse and inconsistent application of content moderation rules. Twitter has long been a place that asks users to balance the benefits of the relationships they build there compared to the level of abuse and harm they experience. Some find the tradeoff doable. Others have left. Elon might make all of this worse, but it’s not like it wasn’t already a problem.

Community has long happened on Twitter, but it was in spite of the product decisions Twitter made and entirely due to the users who loved the platform. The retweet button, for example, came about because users used to manually retweet people using a copy/paste quote method.

The best things about Twitter often were inspired by the people who loved the product despite its flaws. The joke about Twitter leadership from the time the company went public is the people running the show understand what users loved about this place. Mature social platforms such as Twitter often have amassed users by having compelling content, and they speak of that content as arising from free speech principles. Community is just assumed to happen. It'll happen when people speak freely, we are told. Except that's not how things work. You have to cultivate community, and community exists on Twitter because the users built it themselves and sustained it despite dealing with abusive behavior.

The people hand-wringing and leaving due to the sale, listen to what they’re really saying. They're talking about losing the community they’ve spent time building because Elon doesn’t understand that expression and abuse can be symbiotic on a platform with no standards. They’re concerned that hyperfocus on free speech and the promise to restore past abusers portends a big uptick in abuse on a platform that already wasn’t doing a bang-up job dealing with the problem. That balancing of the benefits and harm is potentially about to get thrown out of whack. It might not be worth it anymore, and at some point they will leave.

There is a difference between unfettered speech and pro-social platforms for discussion. Speech can tear down. People can form communities around hate speech and do awful things. Communities aren't inherently good. Bad speech can be harnessed for awful things.

What content moderation tries to do is strike a balance between free expression and fostering community. It is an impossible job full of difficult calls, and I challenge anyone with strong negative attitudes toward moderation to spend even an hour talking with someone who does the job. The work is gut-wrenching. You will not always get it right. But it's inherently an attempt to build a community-building as second factor into content standards rather than making the call only about the right to expression.

One of the big problems with moderation is that the difference between an act of speech and abusive behavior can be harder to entangle than a typical user thinks, an inevitable problem when we turn complex content moderation processes into reductive slogans like “free expression.” Sometimes the speech, while ideological, is also abusive and makes real threats. “I will kill you” is how we want to think about threats online because it’s explicit and easily actionable. But tweeting a picture of a burning cross to a black politician, for example, requires some understanding of history and culture and empathy toward the person on the receiving end, and is harder to defend when people need to see the literal text of a threat in writing to be convinced that a threat was made.

An over-focus on free expression acts as if community is something that organically forms around speech. It does not. It must be built, cared-for, and reinforced. Speech is not discussion per se.

My own diagnosis for what's gone wrong with social media the past 10 years is fairly simple: in the name of having high volume (which meets platform content targets that in turn will sell ads), companies such as Facebook and Twitter have created platforms that forgot markets are conversations.

We talk past one another, not to one another.

Sure, the platforms have the look and feel of conversation, but by virtue of abusive speech that drives people away (exclusion) or algorithms that sort us into echo chambers it’s not an organic give-and-take. Moderation is supposed to create some rules that act as a governing structure by which community can be built and flourished, but when poorly conceived or executed poorly, you end up with what we have instead: a lot of talking, not a lot of real listening.

This is not to say community isn’t possible on these sites despite their worst efforts, because many of us have built it with our own hard work. I think that’s one reason Twitter’s user base will describe the user experience in wildly different ways. If you follow their guidelines in setting up your twttr, you’ll probably end up as mostly a reader. But if you take time to find and follow people interested in similar things, post occasionally, and reply to others, you can build something. Those communities you join become weak ties by which new ideas and information from outside that community can reach you. The community experience, I should stress after 15 years on the app, is very difficult to create, but once you’ve got it you see its potential pretty clearly. There’s a reason 10% of Twitter’s users are considered “super” even though they post 3-4 times a week. We have just built something different, which is why we use it a lot.

A test of which camp you’re in: If you use Twitter, when is the last time you had a really good conversation there? I've had many, and that's what I cherish about this place. But again, I'm an unusual user here. Most on the app just lurk, read and amplify others by retweets. When I say this place has community, this is a foreign concept to those people.

At some point, Twitter made choices to turn those 90% of users into reader/amplifiers who are lurker drones, just resharing content to up Twitter’s advertising revenue. Twitter, it turns out, pivoted to becoming a top-down media product for the vast majority of its user base. But what I’d submit to you is those 10% producing most of that content have experienced community, and they don’t want to lose it.

They’re the ones the company is desperate to not lose.

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So I'll start with my worry for Twitter’s future:

While Twitter definitely has not done enough in the past to foster community by keeping abusive people constrained using consistent and clear rules, the new owner's singular focus on free speech is troubling. What is a marketplace if people are yelling at you, threatening you, and generally being assholes? It's a place you won't shop. You'll find another market.

If he builds his new platform around a speech philosophy alone, the place will die because it will lack community. Not all at once, but slowly. My worry isn't for Twitter at that point. It's that there isn't another market to host our conversation. The people leaving are talking about running from one billionaire's platform to another's right now. I'm not worried about losing my right to speak, I'm worried about a community that can’t come back after it’s lost.

Under a free speech absolutist regime that can’t discern the reality that speech can be abuse, the trolls will be back. Past abusers will come back to do more abuse. If unregulated they will make it hard to have community.

A pro-community setup would allow different forms of identity to have a sense of community online, and all on the same site. We don’t have to agree on everything. But critically, the boundaries of communities are not fixed in online worlds and these communities are going to interact with one another. When abuse isn’t taken seriously, a community in concert can drive another one off the platform.

That’s what I’m talking about here. It’s not moderation of particular points of view, but realizing that how those views are expressed should follow standards that enhance the experience, not drive people away. Elon might think it’s free speech if there is no moderation, but a community-minded free speech ethic says it is not free speech if people are driven offline by trolls. Abuse is a chilling effect.

So that's my fear. Now for my hope.

My hope is Elon learns a very expensive lesson about what he just bought. His debt service payments put him at risk of losing control of Tesla. He has taken an awful risk. In his case, a leveraged buyout means Twitter is too big to fail because of the implications that has for the company he built.

I still am in the camp that Twitter likely will get worse before it gets better. I'm sure Trump will be invited back, though I don’t think he’ll return anytime soon due to his financial interest in making fetch, errr, TruthSocial happen. But if he or other notorious trolls like Alex Jones return, there will be ripple effects. People will leave. Those who stay likely will see an uptick in toxic behavior and in turn think about leaving. Advertisers will get nervous. The financial house of cards gets creaky.

If Elon won't see the philosophical need to balance speech and community, the financial one at least should be obvious to him. He can't afford for Twitter to devour itself and collapse into a pile of worthless assets. In short, losing active users and advertisers will hurt his ability to hang on to his car company. I don’t think he can bleed enough money out of the remaining users through a super app to make up the difference when he already was facing the need to sharply grow revenue from the status quo just to meet debt obligations.

The incentives are there, at least, for Elon to walk back some of the ideas he's thrown out there. He said some first-grade-level ideas about speech restraint when he was a mere user. Now as an owner, the problems are his, including the financial risks/benefits. Owning the joint is going to force him to experience Twitter the way other users do because to retain those users he’s going to have to listen to and understand their experience. Hopefully—hopefully—that listening process would upgrade his thinking and lead to better policies than those he’s espoused so far.

If I’m Elon, I look at Facebook as a cautionary tale. Facebook treated community as neutral and something of a black box, and look what it built. It's a place to connect with old friends and family, find out they have some seriously problematic and vaguely threatening views about the world, and if you get lucky you don't get sucked into one of the thousands of QAnon groups all over the site. They are making boatloads of ad dollars by exploiting and inflating user anger and fears. People hate the site. They just don’t usually leave because their entire social graph is there. Twitter has no such advantage. If it takes the road of becoming a Facebook-style hate machine, it’s a different social calculation for people when they think about the costs of leaving.

The kind of community we need Twitter to be is the kind many of us spent 15 years curating and building. Ones that let us meet new people, learn from them and feel good about those connections. Pro-social. Pro-good. Pro-growth. Pro-human.

I'm hopeful the financial incentives will lead Elon to this conclusion Because if we don't get that, losing Twitter means losing those mostly weak-tie connections that have become not just meaningful for us but helpful. I mean it when I say Twitter has helped me grow as a person because of the people I’ve met and the stories I’ve heard from people who don’t share my experience. It would be difficult to lose that lifeline.

And if we have to leave because Elon can't be taught, I'll say again we need alternatives. But not just places to post. Markets are conversations! We need places to interact and learn from each other. We have enough speech options online in places where such platforms are allowed to operate. What we need are communities that foster good.

We shouldn't settle for less, and we shouldn't be stuck with places that treat free speech as a god to the exclusion of real connection. So I'm going to hope for the best even while I anticipate the worst.

I'm not leaving for now. I know some of you have to, and I honor that. Let's hope if it comes to an exodus, we find a place that values the "us" part of speech. A safe, vibrant, bustling market of human interaction.

Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Twitter (for now!) at @jeremylittau.