08. Twitter

Marketers and analysts utilize sentiment analysis to interpret the emotional tone behind tweets, leveraging tools that use natural language processing and machine learning to classify posts as positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment analysis, which is based on the prevalent attitudes posted on Twitter, aids in tracking trends, understanding public opinion, and improving strategy.

Twitter History

On March 21, 2006, at 9:50 PM PST, Jack Dorsey sent the first Twitter message: “Just setting up my twttr.” The social medium was founded by former Odeo employees Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Twitter’s tipping point occurred at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival when usage soared from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.

I just watched a plane crash into the hudson riv in manhattan.” — Jim Hanrahan (@Manolantern)
Jan. 15, 2009

But the Dec. 21, 2008 tweet announcing that Continental Airlines flight 737 had slid off the runway, sent by Mike Wilson (@2drinksbehind), seated in 13C, thrust Twitter into the news limelight. That was followed by another historic feat. The first January 2009 eyewitness report of a US Airlines jet crash-landing in the Hudson River came four minutes after the crash.

While Janis Krums of Sarasota, Fla., was not the first person to tweet about US Airlines Flight 1549 after it landed in the Hudson River in January 2009, he was the first to post a photograph of the floating plane, via Twitpic, a Twitter picture service at the time.

As Twitter began to scoop mass media regularly, it became the go-to source for millions of new users, who were attracted by its ability to provide realtime news.

• Positioning – The original name for the service was twttr, inspired by the success of Flickr. According to co-founder and CEO Evan Williams, Twitter’s goal was “to maximize the open exchange of information that impacts our world positively.” That positive impact ended on Oct. 28, 2022, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter.
• Network size – Twitter exploded on the scene, rocketing from zero to 100 million in just five-and-a-half years, sometimes growing at a daily rate of 300,000 during its 2009-2010 heydays. Growth peaked in 2022 and has been declining ever since. In fact, Elon Musk tweeted on Nov. 21, 2022, that Twitter has 259.4 million “monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAUs).” While the chart below tracks active monthly users, Musk’s data point suggests the Twitter user decline is actually steeper than previously reported:

• User engagement – In 2007, about 5,000 tweets were being posted each day. By the following year, the figure had exploded to 300,000 daily tweets. By year-end 2009, it was 2.5 million tweets per day. The figure grew more than tenfold to 35 million tweets per day in 2010, an astonishing growth spurt by any stretch of the imagination. In December 2014, Twitter reported 500 million tweets per day. However, daily tweet volume dropped and remained flat for five years, finally growing 20 million to 340 million per day in 2019. About six months after the Musk acquisition, in March 2023, Twitter issued another formal statement using that same murky “roughly 500 million tweets daily” figure. Given the previous decline and minor recovery cited by the GDELT Project, that number is highly suspect.

• Demographics – A May 2011 study by Sysomos researchers found that 57% of Twitter were male and 43% of users were female. That profile has stayed roughly the same, now skewing 60% male and 40% female. A Pew study, called “ Sizing Up Twitter Users,” found that the median age of Twitter users is 40, while the median U.S. adult is 47 years old.
• Geographics – An internal analysis shows that the U.S. accounts for 17% of Twitter users, followed by Japan (12%) and India 5%. Leading Twitter cities include London (2.1%), followed by Los Angeles (1.6%), São Paulo (1.5%), New York (1.4%) and Chicago (1.2%).
• Technology – One of the smartest decisions Twitter made early on was to provide direct community access to outside programs via its “Application Programming Interface” (API), which created a veritable Twitter cottage industry overnight. The use of the Twitter API for sending and receiving text messages by other applications often eclipsed the direct use of Twitter. In July 2011, there were 1 million Twitter applications. On Feb. 1, 2023, Twitter announced that it would no longer support the Twitter API and abruptly cut off access on Apr. 6, 2023. Even researchers who tried to replace their once crucial feeds discovered they had to pay $42,000 a month or more to restore API access.

Elon Musk Hall of Shame

A once-vibrant network that offered a window into the world’s thoughts is slowly withering on the vine. Instead of reinventing Twitter, its new owner has aggressively embraced a strategy of failure, as this timeline of events vividly shows:

• Disinformation floodgates open – Musk didn’t waste any time after his October 2022 acquisition of Twitter. In December, he allowed QAnon to disseminate its extreme memes and complaints, giving their confused collection of conspiracy ideas fresh life.
• Personal antisemitism attacks – George Soros is a Jewish billionaire philanthropist who has given away $32 billion of his fortune to various causes, many liberal. Conspiracy theorists have long attributed wildly varied events to Soros in attacks often viewed as antisemitic. Right-wing conspiracy sites like Russia-propaganda-spreading Zero Hedge and 4Chan push tropes that Soros owns Antifa or paid for Back Lives Matter protestors. On May 15, 2023, Musk further emboldened these antisemitic extremists by likening George Soros to X-Men villain Magneto in a tweet and claiming he “hates humanity.”
• Could care less – When Musk was asked on May 16, 2023 about his incendiary antisemitic tweets, Musk told CNBC’s David Faber that he doesn’t care if his inflammatory tweets scare away potential Tesla buyers or Twitter advertisers saying, “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
• Sex branding – On July 31, 2023, Twitter was rebranded “X” to cater to Musk’s obsession with sex. At Tesla, Musk wanted to name his three car models S, E and X, but Ford refused to sell Tesla the rights to the “Model E” so he called it “3” instead, which is a texting equivalent for “E.”
• Musk reveals his “actual truth” – On Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023, Musk responded to a tweet that said Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” with “You have said the actual truth.” The conspiracy theory that Jewish communities incite “hatred against Whites” is antisemitic and widely accepted by White supremacists.
• Antisemitism report – On Nov. 16, 2023, Media Matters for America published an article that claimed Twitter ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle and Xfinity were appearing alongside material praising Nazis.
• Report backlash – On Nov. 17, 2023, such major companies as Comcast, Disney, EU, IBM and NBCUniversal responded to the Media Matters anti-semitism report by pulling their ads.
• Media Matters sued – Drawing even more attention to the controversy, X sued Media Matters on Nov. 20, 2023, claiming the article “did not reflect what typical users see.”
• Doubling down on conspiracies – Instead of condemning and banning ill-conceived content, Musk has doubled down multiple times. On Nov. 28, 2023, Musk revisited the long-dismissed “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory by posting and then deleting that it “Does seem at least a little suspicious.”
• Advertising boycott – On Nov. 29, 2023, Musk told Twitter advertisers to “go fuck yourself.”
• New Year’s Resolution – Musk rang in 2024 with tweets in which he all but endorsed the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
• Verified antisemitism accounts – On Apr. 16, 2024, NBC News reported that it found at least 150 paid “Premium” subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts that posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X.

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.” — Elon Musk
13-Apr-22 SEC Filing

• “Free speech” – When Musk acquired Twitter, he included the above statement in an SEC filing. That “free speech” policy apparently does not apply to perceived enemies. On July 1, 2024, Musk falsely flagged a Kamela Harris post that polled the X audience about Trump’s abortion stance. On July 23, 2024, reports surfaced that X was improperly restricting users from following Vice President Kamala Harris’ official campaign account.
• Deepfake video retweet – On Friday evening, July 26, 2024, Musk reposted an edited campaign video of Vice President Kamala Harris that appears to have been digitally manipulated in a deceptive manner.
• I guess I do need you after all – On Aug. 6, 2024, Musk sued the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) industry initiative, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), for their “illegal boycott.”
• Inciting violence – That same day, Aug. 6, 2024, the British government urged Elon Musk to act responsibly after he used his 193-million-follower platform to unleash a storm of posts that could exacerbate the country’s deadly August 2024 upheaval.

You couldn’t ask for a bigger fail whale.

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