Anti-social behaviour

I blame Tim Lovejoy. His raving about Twitter, 14 years ago, convinced me to dive in. Such was his endorsement of the social media platform on BBC2’s Something For The Weekend (before it transferred to Channel 4 as Sunday Brunch) that I had to give it a go. 

It was a bit of a laugh back then, with people posting stupid cat videos and making witty remarks about their breakfast. With tweets originally restricted to 140 characters, it started the culture of ‘micro blogging’. Over time, it evolved into an invaluable source of almost immediate information generated by media organisations and businesses, as well as individuals disseminating Things They Know. It created its own luminaries, too - must-read accounts authored by smart, witty people who could write with erudition (and knew the difference between “your” and “you’re”, as well as the role a possessive apostrophe plays in basic grammar). Most of all, it was free. Free! 

But, then – and I’m conveniently truncating history here – Donald Trump came along, and his deranged early morning, stream of consciousness, all-caps tweets (written, we assumed, while he was conducting the day’s first ablutions) started to take Twitter into a very different direction. We had entered the ‘post-truth’ era, and before you knew it, Twitter had become bad for your mental health - especially if you’re susceptible to the grifting of certain politicians and their equally gaslighting acolytes. Views long-banished to the darkened recesses of society were propelled to the surface, or near enough.

Oddly, though, that hasn’t been the worst development. That arguably occurred when Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the platform last October, set about firing half of its employees, and introduced a new subscription model in a clumsy attempt to make it generate more income. Ever since, Twitter has been a raging bin fire of functional and policy changes – believed to be instigated by ‘Space Karen’ himself – that have made the platform a significantly less fun place to be.

For some, this last Saturday may have proven to be the final straw. “Rate limit exceeded – Please wait a few moments then try again” appeared in the place of up-to-the-minute missives about whatever. Twitter appeared to be down. The hashtags #ratelimitexceeded and #twitterdown started trending, except no-one could read the tweets born by them. No-one – with perhaps the exception of Musk – knew what the hell was going on. Twitter wasn’t down - it had been intentionally broken by its owner.

In, oddly, one of the few tweets you could read, Musk later explained what had happened: “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day; - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day; - New unverified accounts to 300/day.”

Immediately there was a collective realisation that Musk was having another dummy-spitting episode about something. He was doing it knowingly, too. Twitter (or Musk) would later raise the restrictions to 8,000/800/400 tweets viewed and then 10,000/1,000/500 respectively, with the South African billionaire clearly finding the whole exercise – and the brouhaha it generated - funny. 

“You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family,” he wrote in another tweet. He then trolled users further by posting: “Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits,” after people had exceeded their cap by posting the “Rate limited exceeded” message and asking what it meant. Many concluded that “data scraping” and “system manipulation” claims had something to do with AI harvesting (other social media platforms have expressed similar concerns) and didn’t want anyone or anything else to profit from Twitter. 

However, given that Saturday’s action effectively shut off Twitter’s basic functionality to its users - and therefore eyeballs belonging to the platform’s lucrative advertising audience - the whole exercise seemed like another gallon of petrol thrown in the blazing bin. Industry analysts said the latest chaos would not help maintain advertisers’ interest in the platform, with one saying that the stunt was “remarkably bad” for them. “This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return [to Twitter]. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg told Reuters, a point of view backed by media buying agencies openly advising clients against using the platform.

Only last month former NBC-Universal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino started work as Twitter CEO with a brief of improving the company’s commercial activity. In fact, according to the Financial Times, Yaccarino had been specifically tasked with restoring relationships with the advertising community, relationships that had been strained since Musk’s takeover and his subsequent tinkering. One industry figure told Reuters that Yaccarino represented the “last best hope” of saving Twitter, which has seen its market value drop to just a quarter of what Musk paid for it.

Key to advertisers staying with Twitter is it continuing to deliver those eyeballs, but in that, no knows for certain how many accounts the platform has, or how many have been closed down since Musk’s takeover (the company no longer discloses how many accounts it has - the last time it did it reported 330 million active monthly users). Several high profile figures, like Sir Elton John have, though, stopped using it since October. 

But for some end users, however, Saturday may well have been the final straw following months of constant, clumsy tinkering: the provocative adoption of Musk’s “free speech absolutism”; introducing the ‘curated’ For You channel no one had asked for (but is oddly addictive); bringing in ‘verified’, subscription-based accounts, replacing previous Blue Tick arrangement for prominent account holders; the arrival of a Wild West of spam and even illegal advertising. 

On Saturday evening, many people - including me - went scurrying off to look for alternative social media outlets that could do the job Twitter had, until relatively recently, done pretty well. The truth is, there aren’t any or, at least, weren’t. There are venerable discussion platforms like Reddit, Tumblr and Mastodon, which has a similar interface to Twitter. There are rivals in development, too, like Bluesky, the semi-available app being developed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. 

None, however, appear to offer the immediacy and – when it was good – reliability of Twitter to keep abreast of world events in real time. Which is why, despite Saturday’s nonsense, many users I know, as well as most of the accounts I follow, were operating as usual yesterday. But with the threat of Musk continuing to tamper with what had once been perfectly good (it just struggled to make any money), there is still an open opportunity for someone to offer a direct rival.

Step forward, then, the direct rival – Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder and, now, CEO of the Meta empire that owns that original social network, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, will this week launch Threads. 

Available to download from the Apple App Store on Thursday, it will be functionally very similar to Twitter by being -  according to App Store blurb - a “text-based conversation app,” and a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today, to what’ll be trending tomorrow.” 

Threads will enable users to post short messages, with images and links to web pages, as well as engage with them through likes reshares. Given that many people on Twitter also have Instagram accounts, Threads users will be able to easily connect to the accounts they follow on that platform.

Given that Musk is said to have challenged Zuckerberg to an actual cage fight, Threads could be the Meta boss’s ultimate counter-strike. According to The Verge, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, said at a recent company meeting that Threads will be “our response to Twitter”, adding that it was being developed in response to “creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” a barb clearly aimed at Musk.

Not that a Meta-run version of Twitter will be perfect. In its pursuit of profits, Facebook has become, at times, an impenetrable forest of sponsored accounts no one asked for, with functional tinkering of its own making it less of a chronological timeline of posts as a miasma of random items and spam ads. And, to cap it all, ads clearly generated by deep mining of browser activities on devices using Facebook and Instagram. 

It’s safe to assume that Threads will make use of the same algorithms. Nor would you bet against Meta applying a tier-based subscription model to it as Musk has done with Twitter. The problem with free stuff is that sooner or later someone decides that it needs paying for.

However, what might determine Threads’ success is the loyalty with which Twitter users remain attached to it. Even after Saturday’s events, and my own search for an alternative (largely to ensure I have something to look at when Musk breaks Twitter for good), it’s a difficult opiate to be weaned off. 

Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom will have access to newswires constantly churning out headlines – click bait before the phrase was even coined – and the Twitter death scroll has fulfilled much the same service. Even in Musk’s batshit-mad world of peppering your feed with ads for things you have no interest in at all (yes, you, Omaze and your bloody million pound house!), it is still, mostly, populated by tweets from organisations we can be individually interested in or, if you choose the ‘For You’ channel, tweets you have an uncannily unexpected appreciation of.

However, with each new belligerent act by Musk, regardless of whether he is genuinely trying to introduce some commercial reality to the platform (or just being disruptive for larks), the Twitter experience gets ever more wearisome. Zuckerberg knows this. He has considerable muscle (Instagram has around two billion monthly active users, according to Meta), but has also shown himself to be very adept at assimilating concepts from elsewhere (Facebook’s feature for ‘disappearing’ stories seemed to have been lifted from Snapchat, just as short-form video ‘reels’ looked a lot like TikTok). So, if anyone can break the Twitter habit, surely it will be him.

Unplugging the social network

There is, already, an irony to the post you're about to read, in that it will be promoted on the very social media services it concerns. But that's purely because, like most people who use social media, I can't help but want attention. Which, let's face it, is mainly how social media came about to begin with.

It is also behind the news today that pub chain JD Wetherspoon is departing social media for good. Now, given the state of the world - not least of which, a third world war in the offing... - this is "probably" not big news. But, partly as a result of social media, news that Wetherspoons is calling "timegennelmenpurleaze!" on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is...er...indeed news.

According to the chain's not-particularly publicity-shy chairman, Tim Martin, social media is a waste of time and even a drain on his pub managers' time. Well, that's one possible reason. Two others are that 1) Wetherspoons doesn't exactly have a massive following on any of its social accounts and 2) the chain has been mercilessly trolled for taking a pro-Brexit stance (in November last year it had 500,000 beer mats distributed throughout its 895 pubs in the UK with a three-point "Brexit Manifesto" calling on the leaders of the main political parties to get a move on with leaving the EU). Another suggestion is that this is all just a publicity stunt - which, given the fact I'm blogging about it, would mean 'mission accomplished'.

Either way, Martin has raised a valid question about the role of social media in the commercial world. "We are going against conventional wisdom that these platforms are a vital component of a successful business," he told the BBC, saying that society would be better off if people cut the amount of social media use, adding a clear dig at Facebook with a reference to the "misuse of personal data".

Somewhat less convincingly, Martin chose to bring up time consumption amongst employees as another reason to leave social platforms behind, saying that "90-to-95%" of his pubs' managers "felt using social media was not helping the business" due to its "addictive nature", adding: "We were also concerned that pub managers were being side-tracked from the real job of serving customers. I don't believe that closing these accounts will affect our business whatsoever."

While I'm sure some Wetherspoons customers might have reason to complain about inattentive bar staff, I very much doubt that they are too busy tweeting out special Friday night offers on jugs of sangria (for reasons of transparency, my local when I lived in Paris - The Bowler - once tweeted me personally because I hadn't been in for a few weeks. Now that is customer engagement!).

Time will tell, though, whether the Wetherspoons departure from social media will have any impact. Conventional wisdom does dictate that a digital presence is essential in the modern world, whether to drive sales, corporate reputation, customer loyalty or all three. Many marketeers believe that Facebook, Twitter and its ilk are simply free advertising platforms which can be augmented by so-called "paid promotion" (essentially, the nub of these networks' business models). The issue, however, is that whether you're an advertiser or simply someone desperate to see friends' cat videos, social media is still, by and large, whatever you want to make of it.

As I wrote, some many posts back, Twitter can be a little like the river of demonic ooze running beneath New York in Ghostbusters, if you dare to be sucked into the reactionary trollery and right wing nutjobs lurking barely below the surface. But it can also be a tremendous expression of democracy, or a wonderful outlet for distributing questionable humour, or the most efficient news feed this side of buying a Reuters subscription.

As for Facebook... Well, the almost-original social network (Friends Reunited, anyone?) clearly has its faults. I won't dwell on the Cambridge Analytica debacle, but there is something intrinsically creepy about suddenly seeing promoted posts for travel companies like Thomas Cook and First Choice on my timeline barely a day after I was looking at summer holidays on my iPad with these very companies. As innocent as it might look, the data harvesting practices of social media networks and their clients concerns me more than anything. They are sitting on a vast amount of information about me, my interests and buying habits which, surely, should be mine to know and for commercial organisations to find out when I choose to buy something from them, and not before.

But back to Charles Martin, who rounded out his decision to take Wetherspoons offline by declaring that people would be "mentally and physically better off" if they limited their social media use to just half an hour a day. Here he may have a point. We certainly know that social media has only added to the complications of modern teenage life, especially amongst girls who, on top of all they've always had to go through, now have to put up with social exclusion, fat shaming and even sexual abuse via the various 'must have' social media platforms they sign up to. Adults are not immune, either, with some living vicariously through Facebook and Instagram, while others suffering feelings of inadequacy as a result of pictures posted of their perfect friends living it up.

The question is, could you do without social media? Would your life feel more complete, rather than less, without it? Those older than the Millennial generation will, of course, have enjoyed life pre-digital. We talked to each other, face-to-face or by phone. If we wanted to show off where we'd been on holiday we handed round a packet of prints from Boots or suburban bores invited friends round for a slide show with fondue.

Now we can share the beach vista as we're sitting in it; we Facebook the meal we're about to eat (though, thankfully, not the final third of the digestion process...); and children will live their entire lives, from the moment they burst out of the womb, in Instagram pictures and stories. And we will lap it all up, so to speak. Because, thanks to the smartphone, we have social media at our fingertips constantly. Just look at a train station at rush hour - banks of stooping commuters, thumbing through their timelines.

And it is exactly this point why, I suspect, JD Wetherspoon will be in a very small minority. In the early days of 'websites', digital interaction was via the PC. Now, it's constant via mobile devices - even smart watches. We fill every unaccounted-for eyeball time with social media sites, on trains and buses, as we walk and as we fly. For some, it's their entire world. For others, it's their only means of self expression. And for others, it's simply a way of avoiding talking to others.

The Wetherspoon chairman's assurance that his company would "still be as vocal as ever" might hark back to the pre-digital age when other media platforms gave companies a voice to the outside world, but the reality - the unbearable truth, if you like - is that in 2018, social media is part of the daily fabric. Rather than leaving such services, corporations should be doing more to make social media a safer place to inhabit. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal and recent stories about the role social media plays in London's epidemic of drug/gang violence should serve as a warning to the vast majority of corporate concerns who do still believe in social media. If there really is a reason for corporates unplugging from social networks, it's that for all the good these platforms do in connecting friends or allowing those without a voice to have one, there is a dark side not worth associating with. That's the minority who take it too far. Yes, you Mr. President.