Back to the Blogs?

Could the decline of Twitter mean we’re headed back to 2005?

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

Twitter could be dying.

Its new owner, Elon Musk, once mused about the possibility. There seems to be some evidence that he was right, as many of Twitter’s most active (and profitable) users are peeling away.

Now that Musk is buying the platform, many of its users are worried about the same thing. People are afraid, with good reason, that under Musk the world’s “town square” will turn into a haven for right-wing edgelords whose exercise of their “free speech” drives all of the reasonable people off of the platform. Musk recently mused about firing 75% of Twitter’s employees — hardly a recipe for a robust and growing platform.

Perhaps Twitter, best known as a source of information about journalism and politics, was always going to decline after the wild rollercoaster of the Trump years came to an end. Maybe people realized that endless doomscrolling was bad for their attention and mental health. Or maybe people have just moved on to other platforms; now they fritter away…