A Time to Kill... Xitter
Dave Lee
There's slowing down to see the wreckage of a car crash – human nature – and then there's having the full crash, gruesome details and all, shoved into your face – but in this case, an actual murder:
I don’t follow this account, but X’s algorithm makes absolutely sure that I see what it has to say. A senseless murder is apparently a content opportunity not to be missed. The user’s post on Tuesday contained all the ingredients for success: It was timely. It was shocking. It was an innocent 32-year-old man dying on the streets of New York City. It was a chance, duly taken, to write an inflammatory comment on Carson’s work in public policy, as though it had somehow led to this moment, as though he had it coming.
As I rode the subway home to Bedford-Stuyvesant, I watched as the video clocked 1 million views, then 2 million. Up up up. Disgusting replies flooded in by the thousands: That’s what you get for supporting woke policies; should have carried a gun; looks planned. By the time I got home, I had deleted the app from my phone.
This is something I know a lot of people are struggling with – myself included. We often joke that Xitter is a shitshow, but actually it's something far more insidious than that now. And yet it remains such a vital source of information when news is actually happening that it's nearly impossible for many of us to quit (even Lee notes that he will continue to monitor the service, because it's part of his job).
One thing the prior Twitter management didn’t do is actively make things worse. When Musk introduced creator payments in July, he splashed rocket fuel over the darkest elements of the platform. These kinds of posts always existed, in no small number, but are now the despicable main event. There’s money to be made. X’s new incentive structure has turned the site into a hive of so-called engagement farming — posts designed with the sole intent to elicit literally any kind of response: laughter, sadness, fear. Or the best one: hate. Hate is what truly juices the numbers.
People have long joked (and not joked!) that using social media makes them feel worse. But the past couple of years of Twitter – and now Xitter – have really shifted that dynamic in the eyes of many. Yes, there are funny tweets, but that's increasingly because the network is a hive of stolen meme content from elsewhere (or other Xitter users). You see the same things that get engagement pop up over and over again just completely ripped off by other users. So even funny things feel bad!
X is now an app that forcibly puts abhorrent content into users’ feeds and then rewards financially the people who were the most successful in producing it, egging them on to do it again and again and make it part of their living. Know this: As the scramble for attention increases, the content will need to become more violent, more tragic and more divisive to stand out. More car crashes, high school fights and public humiliation.
This has all been instituted under the guise of free speech, but that is, of course, bullshit. If Xitter wants to be the haven of truly free speech, it should be a completely open source and un-monetized network that no single company controls. When you have algorithms serving up certain types of content and ads are running against that content, this is all just a game. A really shitty game.
And it's going to get worse. And it's never going to get better. That's just human nature, productized by a flailing company in an attempt to better monetize.
This is why we need Threads to step up and live up to its potential as a real-time network of information. Despite some continued lip service, Meta won't actually do that because they're scared of more regulation and they know that such a network can't be fully monetized in the way that Facebook and Instagram have before it. And it's related to some of the reasons above! But Meta should push Threads down this path anyway, for the greater fucking good.
Yes, I'm looking for a murder. Of Xitter.