What happens if Twitter dissapears?

For 94% of Internet users, there will be no change, but celebrities and politicians will lose their favorite megaphone. Unfortunately, immensely valuable voices will also be lost and another attempt at civil conversation in our interconnected world will have failed.

The world is better with Twitter than without Twitter. I posted this on April 30, when the Twitter acquisition farce was beginning, starring Elon Musk, the most media-savvy, flamboyant, colorful, controversial (and now we know, impulsive) of techno moguls. The question of what Twitter is for was not idle, because that hot, uncomfortable and expensive potato, which devours 4 million dollars a day, could not be sustained forever. And so there was a tempting option, always at hand, to stop the bleeding and kill the little blue bird.

It is one of the possible scenarios. That Musk declare Twitter bankruptcy. Why not? Didn't he mark the field when he declared that he wants to colonize Mars? After proposing something like this, it is clear to your interlocutor that you are capable of anything. Including ending Twitter. What's more, from my point of view, the arrival of Musk means, whether or not he resorts to Chapter 11, the end of Twitter. At least, the Twitter that we knew how to know.

The many and reckless measures that they took these days, although at the moment there is little solid, already disfigure the network of trills in such a way that we can give it as something of the past. It is not yet a fact, and from my point of view what is really going to happen is that we are going to see a progressive degradation of the timeline, until what is happening at the moment is whitewashed: Twitter ceased to be what it was in 2010. In other words, a service that made it possible to flatten the field a bit and give a voice to those who do not have it and could not have it. Today Twitter in a megaphone of the ruling class, celebrities and trolls, mercenaries or crusaders, it doesn't matter.

In fact, the original Twitter no longer exists, and too large a number of tweeters who were very active 10 years ago barely visit the timeline today. Worse still, we feel (perhaps wrongly) that we are missing out on nothing. If something happens, it's going to be on TV.

But it is better that Twitter stays online, and ideally (although I doubt that it will happen) Musk restores his agora character that he once had. An agora that had codes and in which it was impossible to monopolize the time line with endless messianic threads. Start a blog, if you want to spread your truth. Twitter was something else. In its time, and during its brief golden period, it was dialogue, healthy debate, witty humor a little sulfuric; civilized people talking, sometimes more vehemently, sometimes more relaxed, like when we recommended records or books. That's over, mostly.

It is, however, and for this reason I continue to give it my support, a place to find tweeters of race, with that unmistakable acid humor, with precise observations, with verified data and pithy recommendations. That is to say: well-intentioned people who, regardless of their ideas (we all have a little part of the truth), make a contribution by resorting to freedom of expression.

While Twitter was uncomfortable for the establishment, it served a valuable role. Like the independent media. Just how crowded. Then, with a series of lousy company decisions (decisions based on the fact that Twitter was never a business, due to malice or negligence by @Jack and his friends), Twitter became the megaphone for a handful of powerful people. And we returned to zero sheets.

As an end to this failed experiment of conversing with codes, without trolls, without threads, without a lectern, on equal terms, the most powerful of all the powerful – he is the richest man in the world – bought Twitter. He paid double what Zuckerberg had paid for WhatsApp, and Zuckerberg was called crazy at the time. But Zuckerberg invested that $22 billion well.

Elon, on the other hand, realized very soon that he was throwing them into a bonfire of vanities (that is also Twitter today), he wanted to back down, the law prevented him, his lawyer told him that he was going to lose the trial that he had given him. started the company for breach of the agreement, and in October it rotated 180 degrees, paid the 44,000 million (to the horror of Tesla shareholders), arrived with a lavatory, fired the top brass and half the staff, and circulated all kinds of possible maneuvers to avoid running aground the ship. From charging for Twitter to bankrupting it. Well, both things are the same, strictly speaking.

But the thing is, Twitter once belonged to everyone and now it belongs to Elon. Unless the tycoon has a moment of enlightenment and deletes the threads, reduces back to 140 characters and fights the trolls in earnest, Twitter has become a Facebook in a straitjacket. And everything seems to be about to take it out.

The end of childhood

Now, with Musk apparently raising the possibility of his first big business misstep ending in bankruptcy, let's ask ourselves: what if Twitter disappears? A clarification, before. Bankruptcy does not mean the end of a company; rather it is the other way around, it is a resource to get out of the quagmire. But it may be the beginning of the end, especially for a company that has failed to make money. What happens, then, if Twitter disappears?

The first thing that is going to happen is that many people are going to lose their jobs. Many good people, including many SMEs, will feel the impact. But, above all, it will be felt by vast armies of trolls who, disoriented, will discover how fragile and fleeting their power was, and they will no longer have a way to tear apart those who do not think as their bosses want us all to think. The trolls killed dialogue and dissent on Twitter, and with that Twitter became such a toxic and hostile environment that people who wanted to participate in the agora fled in fright. Of all the relevant social networks, it is the one with the fewest subscribers, the only one that is not growing, and yet it is the one that appears in the news the most.

That's the other thing that's going to happen. Public relations agencies and representatives of celebrities, athletes, politicians and others will suddenly find their business booming again. With Twitter gone, now they must return to the newsletter, to the statement and, perhaps, hopefully, to the press conference where the spokesman does not confuse the lectern with a pulpit and instead of giving sermons he answers the questions.

From a business point of view, some brands will have to rethink a part of their online strategy. “But only the biggest ones,” someone from the digital marketing environment told me these days, “because you need people 24x7 looking at everything on Twitter, getting on every trend and, obviously, a shock force to stop the trolls.”

Again, of course, the inclined court. Twitter, where once, as now on Instagram, SMEs could make themselves heard, are now devastated by piranha attacks whose logic, origin and meaning are often not even understood. We went from passionate dialogue to deaf dialogue, and today, with numerous exceptions, to a crazy conversation. Yes, I said numerous exceptions. Because there are a lot of law tweeters, but, as one of them recently confided to me, "the attacks are so beastly that you don't want to talk anymore." Another, a very dear friend, from the first hour of Twitter, reflected, with resignation and via DM: “There is no need to dramatize either. In general, from the freedom of the Internet in 1995 there is not much left either.”

Therefore, to be clear, if Twitter disappears, unfortunately, accounts (in other words, people or small groups of people) that make extraordinary contributions also disappear. Maybe they will migrate to Mastodon, although it is not the same; I don't know.

But I insist on this idea: the West is better with Twitter than without Twitter. That is why totalitarianisms prohibit it. So, even with all the damage that has been done to it – and that Elon, despite his absolutist promises, seems unwilling to heal – it would be too bad for Twitter to disappear. Due to this series of bad decisions mentioned above, today the number of people who pay attention to the bird's network is negligible. Barely 6% of all Internet users and something like 3% of human beings. It is far from moving the needle, and if it is still in the news it is because it has become a showcase for those who before Twitter had to pay for that showcase. The plan was different, as veterans will remember.

So if Twitter goes bankrupt, it will start a process in which one of the attempts of democratic societies (not the first, and I doubt very much the last) to use the Internet to debate civilly, listening to each other, contributing honestly, could disappear. without hogging the microphone, diverse and symphonic, accepting that he who does not think like you, at least thinks. That was always a lot.

But trolls, bad decisions, and moguls who think they are above the law (as the Federal Trade Commission told Musk yesterday) can do a lot except stop dreaming. What does this mean? Something poetic to finish off a cyberpunk eulogy? No. It means that Twitter can go bankrupt, but it is a matter of time (and not long) before its function, that of giving voice to all those who have no voice, is replaced by another service. By then, we'll have learned a number of lessons, like we learned with Usenet and IRC, and the new iteration will be better. We Twitter veterans know this. Twitter may go away, but if we were able to have civil debate once and use the timeline to think collaboratively, we can do it again. And if we can't even chat, then we have a much bigger problem than the disappearance of Twitter.