Twitter is hell and it’s been that way since long before its acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. Almost since its inception, it has been a site hosting disinformation, extremist rallying cries and screaming matches that leave everyone involved angrier while minds stay unchanged. According to the RAND Corporation, in the mid-2010s, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria used it to recruit foreign fighters through a network of accounts pushing propaganda. The platform was the source of conspiracy theories surrounding the Parkland High School shooting, as right wing activists and Russian accounts masquerading as Americans spread lies that included calling the victims “crisis actors.” These black marks on the platform’s record and many more all occurred before Elon Musk got his hands on it and axed its moderation team.
There’s no denying it’s gotten much worse after.
In the succeeding months after the takeover, the platform saw usage of the n-word increase by 53% as well as usage of the f-slur increase by 39% as reported by AP News and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Twitter-now-X has shucked all pretenses of respectability and control, ditching tons of vital staff and slashing its moderation team, and slotted itself neatly in the box of “alt-tech.” It now shares user bases and moderation philosophies with alt-right and nazi adjacent platforms like Gab, Truth Social and Hatreon—all of which claim to share a “free speech absolutist” position which Musk has echoed.
Musk also modified the algorithm—which many have said now pushes hateful content directly to users. A Washington Post analysis found the “For You” page was showing new users towards the Southern Poverty Law Center identified hate groups and conservative influencers.
Old habits die hard, so even though X has aligned itself with the fascistic right and its owner has carved out a place for himself in Donald Trump’s administration, it is still home to many users who can’t put the app away. That has been changing, though. NBC News reported that immediately following Musk’s purchase the platform saw a mass exodus of users. Now, the platform appears to finally be losing more users than it gains according to a graph by the company, Backlinko.
These lost users spent about 40 minutes in the virtual desert before settling on a small selection of Twitter-like alternatives. The same NBC News article states that those are the Facebook-owned Threads and the independent Bluesky. Independent and decentralized platform Mastodon was also a popular choice, but these platforms all share the same inherent flaws that X/Twitter has had both before and after the Musk takeover.
Algorithms and character count limitations are what made Twitter rotten from the start, and it’s what makes these new platforms uncomfortable to use now. While Twitter refugees try to find a ‘non-toxic’ version of the site, one must accept that such a platform does not and cannot exist while the glaring holes in the foundation of microblogging continue to go unfilled.
On algorithms, most Twitter replacements have them. Threads is the most traditional in this regard, with a standard engagement-based algorithm. It pushes posts that have the most engagement, positive or negative. This kind of algorithm is more or less the same that X has and it’s led to the same swath of problems for Threads.
Threads is known for having an ‘engagement bait’ problem. According to The Verge, posts with inflammatory questions, polls or disingenuous takes meant to farm engagement are what leads the pack in terms of highest-climbing posts on the platform. It also takes a hands-off approach to moderation, with no will or effort being expended to actually rid the platform of these types of posts.
Bluesky operates on a policy of “algorithmic choice.” A post on the company’s blog explains the idea that Bluesky’s Application Programming Interface (API) and codebase allow users to select or build their own algorithms for content suggestion. Its “Algorithmic Marketplace” seems like an improvement out of the gate, but the problem is not with which algorithm is making suggestions, but with the algorithms themselves.
All algorithms exist, on some level, to promote posts that are the most interesting or engaging, decided by weighing some combination of search engine optimization terms and the platform’s likes/reposts/replies functions. Ultimately, any attempt to flatten an attempt at human communication—ultimately what every post on social media is—into a numbers game will end up funneling you into either an echo chamber of one variety or another or into a cycle of anger-inducing posts that appear because they are the most engaging.
Character count limitations also raise problems in limiting how effective one can be in getting a point across. On platforms with a focus on discussion and debate, you’d expect designers to allow people enough room in the text box to say what they need to say. Unfortunately, many of these platforms champion the opposite. X limits users to 280 characters—which is almost never enough to actually make a coherent argument.
By limiting character counts, nobody making a well reasoned and thoughtful argument will be able to get the totality of that argument across. This leads to people truncating their arguments to the most sharp, witty critiques or the punchiest “gotcha” moments. This is great for people who are lifelong fans of straw-manning other people’s arguments, but completely flies in the face of any possible good faith conversation.
That is unless you want to break up any point you are trying to make into tens of little posts strung together in a recursive series of replies. If I have to read another “thread” on one of these platforms, I might go berserk.
When coupled with the aforementioned problems inherent to algorithmic social media aggregation, if you want to make it big on a Twitter clone, you’re almost forced to engage in the surface level, dunk-based, pithy platitude sharing engagement bait that plagues these platforms.
And for those who think platforms can moderate themselves out of these problems, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find good moderation on any of these platforms. Threads is owned by Meta (Facebook) and run by the team behind Instagram. Meta currently finds itself under scrutiny for slashing down its already impotent team of fact checkers and moving those who remain to Texas.
The team behind Instagram isn’t much better, with moderation decisions constantly opaque and hidden behind layers of AI. Instagram is also known for abysmal comment moderation. This is most prevalent in its “Reels,” which are commonly known for having some of the most vitriolic comment sections on the internet, especially when it comes to queer content creators.
Bluesky is currently in the midst of a civil war between its user base who want a platform more willing to protect transgender voices and a moderation team steeped in a lighter form of the free-speech absolutism that poisoned Twitter. Debates and petitions from users to remove the account of transphobic journalist and frequent hate-monger Jesse Singal were met with both-sidesism and hand wringing.
Mastodon leaves moderation up to the creators and administrators of individual instances of its software being hosted due to its decentralized nature. This leads to a vastly rockier landscape in terms of moderation, with quality of moderation determined on a case by case basis.
Both of these problems are inherent holes in the foundation of Twitter-esque microblogging platforms. Together, they provide the perfect mix of algorithmically encouraged, vitriolic hate-mongering that ultimately keeps you on these sites longer for the purpose of showing you more ads. They are purpose-built, doom scrolling machines.
One of the only platforms—which has never billed itself as a Twitter alternative but is still used by some as such—that avoids these issues is Tumblr. While the site has a moderation history very recently scarred by a CEO who had a public meltdown over criticism he received vis-a-vis over-moderation of trans people on the site, it has never had an algorithmically driven “For You” page as the main draw of the platform.
The platform is driven forward by its “reblog” function and its dashboard is strictly chronological. You follow your friends and then you follow their friends when you see a post they’ve reblogged, repeat ad-nauseam until you’ve curated your own web of posters that will show up. Furthermore, there is no character limit. Political arguments on the site can be as vitriolic as anywhere else, but at least you can make a coherent thought and perhaps even cite resources to back up your argument.
It’s likely for this reason that it loses $30 million per year. A site with minimal algorithms, few advertising opportunities, that actually seems to respect its users’ intelligence on some level and cultivates a unique culture and community will never be financially stable in the current market.
So, with all this in mind, maybe it’s time to put down the Twitter clones. With the death of Twitter, we should learn our lesson and leave this format of social media behind. Maybe we’d all find some extra time to go touch grass.
