The Twitter Question

An email I sent to clients a couple of weeks ago regarding Twitter...

This week Twitter got rid of everyone's blue checkmark and is making people pay $8 a month to get it back. They also announced some changes to their algorithm, like that external links are bad, the new value of likes and retweets, etc. They also reminded people that bad behavior will not be tolerated. 

Why this is all complete crap:

> Links are "bad" on every social media platform because they don't want you to send people away from the platform unless you pay for an ad. It is not a quirk of the algorithm. It is a shakedown for money.

> The value of likes, retweets, and replies changes all the time. You cannot count on it. In fact, Musk was furious when his tweet at the Superbowl got lower numbers than Joe Biden's. When his engineers said the algorithm was working fine, he fired some of them and then made the others remove the algorithm from his account. He also made them set it so that his tweets showed up in everyone's feed whether they opted to follow him or not. So if you want to defeat the algorithm, buy the company. It is currently valued at one-third of what Musk paid for it, so it is kind of cheap.

> "Be nice... or else" - Not true. Hate speech has skyrocketed on Twitter since Musk took over. And it will not get better, because in his last round of layoffs, he got rid of a number of people who monitored that. Incidentally, so did Facebook. 

> "That blue checkmark is more than just pretty." - Not really:

- It does not mean that your tweets will be shown to more people. It just means that not having the checkmark will mean your tweets are shown to even fewer people than before. And really, we should not even use the word "people." We should say "accounts," since so many Twitter handles are run by bots now. 

- There is not a lot of due diligence being done to verify the identity of people who pay for the blue checks. Hence the person who created a fake Eli Lilly account, bought a blue checkmark, and then tweeted out, "Good news! Insulin is now free!"

- The checkmark with any real heft is the gold one. And that costs $1,000 a month.

- These rules only apply to the bottom 99%. From the New York Times - "Twitter is set to make some exceptions regarding which companies get to retain their check marks without paying. In an internal document, the company said it would let the 10,000 most-followed organizations, and the top 500 advertisers, that have already been verified keep their status." In other words, Taylor Swift gets her gold checkmark for free.

- On top of all that, Twitter's usage / popularity continues on a steady decline.

To me the question is not: Should we pay for the checkmark? To me the question is: Should we just abandon Twitter?