Today, Twitter accepted Elon Musk's bid to buy the social network. I am optimistic that he will make improvements which will increase Twitter's value substantially, perhaps even 1-2 orders of magnitude over time.
Most of the debate around Twitter rests on the premise that it (and other social networks) must strike some careful content curation balance in service to The Truth. Unfortunately, The Truth in question is not the objective truth (as we might assume), but rather something like the Overton Window, comprised of the current set of our society's consensus beliefs. This means that consensus untruths are welcomed while inconvenient truths are often forbidden. (For instance, Twitter banned many users in the spring of 2020 for claiming that masks wouldn't stop the spread of COVID-19. The given justification was that this was not "scientific consensus". Of course, a few months later, consensus emerged that... drumroll... masks didn't stop the spread of COVID-19! Did Twitter management learn anything from such episodes? Anyway, I digress.)
I think Musk's plan to allow anyone with a government-issued ID to become verified (the current "blue checkmark") will circumvent this issue over time, because your credibility will become yours to protect or waste, as you see fit. The second piece is allowing users to customize their Twitter feed filtering and sorting, ideally by open sourcing content curation algorithms, so anyone can be a curator.
Wait, you say: people don't care about credibility - many verified accounts will lie as much as ever! Well, that's true. But, Twitter's problem has never been liars; rather, it has been keeping liars' tweets off the feeds of people who don't want to read them. Those people (like everyone else) would have a rich ecosystem of curation algorithms to choose from, both free and paid. Interestingly, I think this approach strengthens Twitter AND established media institutions, by giving them an opportunity for greater relevance while binding them to Twitter's platform. Certainly an organization like the New York Times would have tremendous opportunity in curating a feed for their subscribers. Twitter could even facilitate payments between the three stakeholder groups - Twitter might charge a content curator a platform fee per user who subscribes to that curator's algorithm (in which case the subscription would be free to the user), OR, at the curator's election, Twitter could handle user subscription payments - an amount offsetting some or all of the platform fee, and remitting any balance above back to the curator. In other words, the curator can choose to price their product to the user at a level above, below, or breakeven with Twitter's per-user platform charge. (And, advertising could still exist within this framework - served by Twitter at a frequency set by the curator, with ad impressions and/or click-thrus offsetting the platform fee.)
If curation will be a free market competing on quality, then why verify accounts at all? Quite simply, because it is likely to be a powerful data point helping algorithms to isolate signal strength.
Policing the truth of tweets (regardless of how it is defined) is unrealistic and will remain so for a long time to come. After all, who arbitrates the truth? (A hopeful answer: blockchains, eventually.) At a minimum, the effort is enormously expensive. But, pushing curation into a third-party marketplace will spur competition for effective algorithms. It may be that arbitration above and beyond optimizing user engagement is unnecessary. (I know, I know, engagement selects for sensationalism. But is that still true when many options exist?) A more elegant solution would emerge from the data itself - the network and emergent sub-networks of tweets and tweeters, constantly forming, shifting, and dissolving. Is Charlie Munger's "seamless web of deserved trust" possible amongst large groups of people, who seldom experience reciprocation on a one-to-one basis? Or does that miss the point, that the problem isn't "in-group" trust, but tribalism itself - our innate tendency to polarize into factions that stop listening to each other? Solving for gradual de-polarization (perhaps in the guise of empirical thought) sounds like a big market opportunity, itself! At a minimum, lots of things become possible (yes, both exciting and terrifying) when curation is allowed.
I think people forget that Elon Musk is the most successful product manager of his generation (this coming from a mediocre product manager of seventeen years). By obsessing over the idea of getting content curation *just right*, Twitter management have ignored that they are still in pole position to someday be *the* platform for all self-authored content. It is reprehensible to me that in 2022, Twitter still hasn't scaled to longer-form content (e.g., buying Substack or building a competitor), not to mention reached out to meet other similar mediums (e.g., visual and performative arts) wherever they are found online. But those are small irritations compared to the ability to surface valuable and worthwhile content to billions of people. After all, that’s what's at stake.
