Prior to Musk's purchase, Twitter - as a platform - was applauded for its ability to allow people to connect and send out relevant information.
Not anymore.
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For a good long time, if you wanted to watch a major news event unfold online, your best bet was probably Twitter. It offered a flawed and partial view of what was going on during, say, a major hurricane, when official warnings and on-the-ground reports from professionals and amateurs had to contend with shark hoaxes and conspiracy theories, but it was clearly a useful resource. During Hurricane Sandy, I remember it as a source of local information and an outlet for my own local reporting. Online, at least, it was where the bigger picture came into focus early: The storm had been huge — worse than expected — and entire neighborhoods had been devastated.
It was one of those small golden eras you didn’t realize you were in, in part because it didn’t seem that great but mostly because you had no idea how much worse things would eventually get. For most of the 2010s, sources posting on Twitter were relatively diverse and, while frequently shitty and even malign, easy enough to verify or dismiss. News professionals treated Twitter as a second, unpaid job. Local, state, and national officials treated it as a broadcast system. Locals and eyewitnesses understood that it was an efficient way to get the word out. People with large followings worked as aggregators, sharing and amplifying what they were seeing in their feeds. It was also fast. In 2011, I saw posts about an earthquake in D.C. a few seconds before I felt my office chair wiggle in Manhattan. Twitter was always a mess, but it had something. In the right circumstances, it could actually be useful.
If, yesterday, you found yourself in the path of Hurricane Milton or were concerned about friends or family in Florida, you might have logged on, out of habit, to see what was happening. You would have encountered something worse than useless. On a functional level, the app is now centered on the algorithmic “For You” page, a sloshing pool of engagement chum in which a Category 5 hurricane gathering power in the Gulf is left to compete with videos of car crashes, posts from Elon Musk–adjacent right-wing maniacs, and a dash of whatever poorly targeted interest-based bait the platform thinks you might engage with, all collected from the past couple weeks. In this feed, paid blue checks get the most visibility, which is exactly what you don’t want in an emergency, in part because of the sorts of people who choose to subscribe to X — the sorts of people who, like the site’s owner, see major storms primarily as an opportunity to tell lies about people they hate — but just as much because of the people who don’t: local reporters and meteorologists, municipal services, fire and police departments, schools, relief organizations, and regular people who find themselves in the middle of a serious situation. The chronological “Following” feed is diminished as well. People have left. The platform’s norms around sharing and resharing good or valuable information have collapsed. There’s still something happening under the surface on X, and it maintains some functionality as a tool for sharing and gathering unique and scarce information from real people who otherwise might not get heard (most vividly over the past year, it has been, with TikTok, a vital source of on-the-ground reporting and testimony from Gaza). But it’s massively diminished and getting worse. It’s next update, which will base blue-check creators’ payouts on how much engagement they get from other blue-check creators, will, under current circumstances, function as something close to an in-kind donation to the campaign to elect Donald J. Trump.
