Twitter has long positioned itself as the “global town square” in which the world comes together to have a shared conversation across geographic and cultural boundaries. Such was the early vision of last decade’s social platforms, that they would bring us together as a society and overcome the ability of elites to dictate the global conversation. Instead, even as Twitter’s CEO touted his company’s global reach in 2013, the platform’s growth had leveled off and over the half-decade since, Twitter has shrunk almost in half, shed its vaunted geotagged resolution, centralized around an ever-older set of elite accounts and transitioned from a place to hear from the world to a place to retweet from afar. What does this mean for the future of the global town square?
The great dream of social media was that it would give everyone a voice. From heads of state to ordinary citizens, everyone, no matter where they lived, what they looked like, what their background or place in society was, would be equal. Most importantly, these social platforms would be free to publish to and consume and would not prefer the wealthy and powerful over the traditionally disenfranchised.
Elites would no longer control the global conversation. We would finally have our long-elusive vision of communicative democracy.
Instead, as our social platforms have matured, they have increasingly reverted back to the centralization and elite control of every other form of media that preceded them. Worse, they have emboldened and empowered repressive governments throughout the world to use them to censor speech and surveil their citizenry. They have undermined democracy, flooded us with fake news, and contributed to genocide. They have even normalized an entire planet to the idea of a privacy-free future in which surveillance and the commercial trade of our intimate physical and digital information is simply a way of life.
Twitter was long the exception among its peers. While most other platforms focused on facilitating private communication, Twitter fashioned itself as a global marketplace of ideas in which messages were sent to the world and shared publicly by default. This relentless chronological firehose was imagined as something that could finally level the playing field for everyone.
originally posted on Forbes.com by Kalev Leetaru
