Twitter prepares for life after Trump

It’s easy to forget now, but there was a time when a popular view of Twitter was that of a largely frivolous platform for celebrities and their fans. Yes, Twitter has always had its serious side — it played notable roles in the Arab Spring circa 2011 and the Ferguson protests of 2014 — and its dark side, including rampant racism and misogyny from anonymous accounts. But before 2016, it was known less as a political and sociocultural battleground than as a venue for silly memes and pop-culture moments, like the Oscars selfie snapped by Ellen DeGeneres in 2014 that broke the record for the most-shared tweet of all time.

Also easy to forget is that, in 2016, Twitter’s future was in doubt. Its user base had stagnated; it was losing money; and worst of all, it couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. A place to passively follow topics of interest? A second screen for live events? A hub for live video in its own right? It didn’t seem to matter what it tried: As a Verge headline put it in 2016, “nothing Twitter is doing is working.” The company’s outlook was so bleak that it was soliciting offers for a corporate buyout — except nobody wanted to buy it. Disney passed because it found Twitter “too nasty”; Salesforce bowed out after CEO Marc Benioff hurt his knee and took it as a sort of celestial sign.

Then came the election of Donald Trump, and for four years, everything turned around. But that four years is almost up. Is Twitter ready to thrive without the tweeter-in-chief? A series of coming product changes, including this week’s launch of Fleets, will test its ability to broaden its appeal beyond that of an ideological Thunderdome or a news ticker for the demise of democracy.
The Pattern

Trump redefined Twitter. Now Twitter has to redefine itself.

Trump’s presidency may have saved Twitter. A president whose candidacy had been fueled by Twitter conspiracies and the MAGA hashtag came to rely on the platform as his direct line to the public and his supporters. It let him bypass not just traditional media outlets but his own White House communications apparatus with incendiary, haphazardly punctuated tweets that drove the national news cycle on a daily basis — and even, at times, global affairs. That, in turn, spawned an online “resistance” as the left sought to counter Trump on his own digital turf. If Twitter was fertile ground for Trump’s reactionary populism, it has been equally instrumental for progressive populists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If it wasn’t Trump that saved Twitter, it may have been the algorithmic timeline. It’s hard to overstate the effects of Twitter’s mid-2016 shift from a reverse-chronological feed to a Facebook News Feed-style algorithm that shows each user what it thinks they’ll want to see. It not only boosted engagement but likely amplified the dynamics of polarization and sensationalism and made the platform more exploitable by bots, trolls, propagandists, and demagogues — including Trump. Indeed, it seems likely that Trump’s dominance of Twitter and the success of the algorithmic timeline were intertwined, with each reinforcing the other.
It’s also no coincidence that Twitter has become ground zero for a seismic culture war that has forced open the Overton window to ideas once considered radical on both the right and left. Even as neo-Nazi trolls proliferated on the right, #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter protests put Twitter in the vanguard of a resurgent civil rights movement. For better or worse, Twitter has never been more relevant, especially in its home market of the United States, which remains its largest and by far its most lucrative.
It shows in the company’s bottom line, which has trended steadily upward for exactly four years. At its mid-2016 nadir, Twitter was valued at less than $10 billion. Today, it’s worth more than three times that. With the exception of a coronavirus-induced ad crash earlier this year, the company has been profitable since 2017. In 2019, it stopped counting casual monthly users — a number that had been slowly shrinking — and switched to “monetizable daily active users,” a narrower core group that has steadily expanded. That move signaled that Twitter had fully abandoned the D*** Costolo-era notion of becoming a mass medium for passive consumption and embraced Jack Dorsey’s vision of an interactive platform built on habitual users who don’t just lurk but participate.
By this point, Twitter’s importance to public figures, brands, and the media is not in question. But with Trump slated to leave office (one hopes!) in January, its starring role in the political circus that has captivated the public since 2016 is no longer assured. Biden is in many ways the anti-Trump, and part of his promise is to restore a normalcy that will allow America and the world to turn off Twitter and cable news and get on with their lives. He is not at home on social media and seems highly unlikely to post rogue tweets that set the world abuzz. Twitter will remain Washington’s watercooler, but it will no longer be the main stage on which a superpower’s politics play out.
Trump himself may or may not survive on Twitter once he’s out of office. As the Washington Post and others have reported, he’ll lose the special exemptions from Twitter’s rules that the company carved out for world leaders during his presidency (and, let’s face it, largely because of his presidency). That means he could be banned or suspended from the service for the same kinds of posts that he’s been churning out for four years. Betting on Trump to change his spots would seem a poor wager, so it will probably come down to Twitter’s willingness to dig in and risk losing him and his MAGA army to a rival, such as Parler.
Against that backdrop, Twitter’s next suite of product changes can be seen at least partly as the company’s preparation for a post-Trump future. This is not to say that’s the intent behind them, per se — some of these updates have been brewing for a long time. But it is the context in which they arrive, and it makes their success feel pivotal for a social network whose place in the zeitgeist may be at risk.
Fleets are an interesting start. While hardly innovative from a product development standpoint — they’re basically just Twitter’s version of Instagram Stories, which was itself a clone of Snapchat Stories — they shook up the experience of using Twitter in a bracing way. The dog pictures, selfie videos, pop-culture references, and tossed-off memes that filled the “fleet line” in its first days formed a stark contrast to the ceaseless panic and outrage of many users’ home timelines. Many exuded an amateurishness or earnestness that might feel grating in another context but refreshing in juxtaposition to the rest of Twitter.
Most promisingly, Fleets by design invite users to privately message one another with personal replies as opposed to publicly liking or retweeting each other’s content. It’s a more intimate, humane form of connection that has never been Twitter’s strong suit — probably because a lot of the people you follow are likely to be strangers rather than friends. It’s possible that Fleets and the DMs they spur will die down once the novelty wears off, relegating the feature to the status of an add-on with niche appeal, like Periscope and Vine before it. But if it does have staying power and becomes core to the Twitter experience in the way that Stories have on Snapchat and Instagram, Fleets could make for a fuller, more varied Twitter experience that is both more fun and less exhausting.
There’s a similar potential for Spaces, a “coming-soon” feature that Twitter teased in a call with journalists this week. In what appears to be Twitter’s answer to the buzzy startup Clubhouse, Spaces will allow users to create audio chat rooms, holding invite-only conversations that anyone can listen in on. Notably, the feature will be offered first to a small group of women and people from marginalized communities — which feels like a well-placed subtweet of Clubhouse, whose early user base skews male and privileged.
As with Fleets, what’s distinctive about Spaces is not the product idea itself but the role it could play in the context of Twitter, with its public nature and asymmetric follower networks. One could imagine Spaces tapping a similar cultural vein as the Oscars selfie — that is, a venue for celebrities to interact with each other in a spontaneous, personal way that is both familiar to and uniquely accessible to the average fan. Or perhaps they’ll turn out to be more like the social-media version of a panel discussion, which would be less exciting but perhaps more in keeping with the direction Twitter has taken over the past four years.
What Fleets and Spaces hint at is a conceivable near-future in which the Twitter of, say, 2022 feels fundamentally different from the Twitter of 2020. Twitter’s own articulation of its goal revolves around the idea of “healthy conversations,” but that seems like maybe a bridge too far for a platform that today exemplifies pretty much the polar opposite. What is possible to imagine is that Twitter becomes a somewhat more social network, one in which the roles of fun and frivolity are restored to their rightful place alongside politics.
Yet even that might be too optimistic, both about Twitter’s ability to reinvent itself and about the course of real-world events. Hell, we don’t even know for sure at this point that Trump will leave office. But we know that if and when he does, the fires he set will still be burning. When the whole world feels like it’s on a dark timeline, it’s hard to imagine Twitter’s being any other way. A safer bet might be that Twitter remains fundamentally the Twitter that we know and love-hate today — a constant skirmish of ideas and tribes, at once addictive and vaguely monotonous — with perhaps a bit less Trump and a bit more of, well, whatever it is we’ll be fighting about next.
The New York Times