Why I’ve Quit Twitter, Why You Should Too - And Why Social Media Should be Regulated

Business
Written By Thomas

I’ve never been a huge fan of Elon Musk. While acknowledging his incredible abilities to get things done in highly complex industries (automotive and rocket science), one of my very first posts on this blog was calling him out for being a climate fraud.

But not being an Elon fan doesn’t necessarily mean I have to quit Twitter.

After all, you don’t need to love the owner of a company to use its products. I can’t tell you anything about the guy who owns Lidl, but I’m very happy to buy cheap Cava.

(actually, that’s not totally true. I do remember that Lidl is one of those amazing German family firms still owned by the guy who inherited it from their dad fifty years ago!)

But Elon Musk is different.

He has entwined his personal brand with that of Twitter so comprehensively that using Twitter really does feel like an endorsement of him.

You’re the product

Social media is not like a supermarket. A supermarket is a financial transaction: I buy wine, and Lidl takes a cut. But with social media, usage is free but - in return - you’re handing over your content. Both as content creator and viewer, you are the product.

That is a much more intimate relationship. And, the truth is, I struggle being intimate with Elon Musk.

It’s all about Elon

The penultimate straw was last October when he Tweeted “I support Russell Brand” after a whole bunch of incredibly brave women stood up against a rich and powerful celebrity who thought he had impunity.

Then, a few weeks later, he tweeted “What a blatant racist!” in response to a misleading video of Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf. It was a historic clip deliberately edited to make the First Minister sound critical of white people when it was, in fact, from a longer speech addressing racism and prejudice.

I’m no Scottish Nationalist but I was horrified at the owner of Twitter spreading a misleading video to his >150 million followers. This is exactly the behaviour that has made Twitter dangerous. He should be role-modelling the precise opposite.

And it’s especially unpleasant when he’s “punching down”: using his platform to support the rich and powerful (e.g. Russell Brand) against women and ethnic minorities.

So, I quit.

Since then he’s become so much worse. Last month, he started trolling the Prime Minister with misleading videos promoting a far-right conspiracy theory around two tier policing. TwoTierKier, read Elon Musk’s hashtag.

And it’s on just the content of Elon Musk’s tweets. He controls the algorithms that decide what you see. This is an editorial relationship analogous to a newspaper editor. We do not know what decisions he has made (though it seems that he’s made it easier to see far-right content) but we do know he’s made his own tweets more prominent because he told us so:

I do not buy the Daily Mail because its owner encourages editorial decisions I do not agree with. That’s why there’s a range of newspapers. I do not feel compelled to buy the Daily Mail in order to get news.

But I do feel compelled to stay on Twitter.

This is a problem.

Impregnable network effects

Quitting Twitter is incredibly hard. I have a business to promote.

I used to work at Transport for London: famous for being a monopoly. Because it’s a monopoly, it’s run by the state. No billionaires work at TfL. Elon Musk, by contrast, works at the sharp end of capitalism (and has been richly rewarded for doing so).

But Twitter is every bit as much a monopoly as TfL. Social media’s network effect creates an almost unbreakable monopoly.

Currently, Twitter has all of the benefits of being a monopoly but none of the controls.

You can check out but can you leave?

I have nearly 800 followers on Twitter. It’s not many, but it’s a start.

At the time I quit Twitter, I signed up on the main competitors of Twitter: Mastodon, Blue Sky and Threads.

I now have 3 followers on Mastodon, zero on Blue Sky, and 11 on Threads. Moreover, these platforms together only have around half the users of Twitter.

The reality is that posting on Mastodon or Threads or Blue Sky would be pointless, as no-one would see. So I haven’t. But I’m not going to get followers if I don’t post. Which - as I’ve just proved - I won’t. And most people won’t join a platform where people aren’t posting. But people won’t post if people don’t join…

So everyone stays on Twitter, even if no-one actually wants to.

The result is that Twitter has an absolute monopoly for this kind of social network.

(And don’t mention Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp or Snapchat or LinkedIn or Telegram - they all work in very different ways and do very different things. I’m talking about a competitor to Twitter in the way that Aldi is a competitor to Lidl but Next is not, despite them both being high street retailers)

If it’s hard for me, think how hard it would be for Gary Linekar (8.8 million followers) or Adele (27 million followers). Switching platforms would literally take them back to zero.

What can be done?

One of the weirdest things is the way the competition authorities seem to be doing so little to address this.

Like many colleagues in transport, I’ve frequently spent happy hours dealing with Competition Commission investigations into rail franchise awards and corporate takeovers which might result in a lessening of competition on a handful of comparatively minor origin-destination pairs.

Meanwhile, here’s a piece of information technology absolutely critical to news dissemination owned by a man of dubious moral temperament and no-one’s doing anything about the fact it’s a locked-in monopoly.

Maybe the authorities have given up?

Network effects are the most powerful type of monopoly. It’s impossible to ask Elon to divest a bit of Twitter as it’s not obvious how it can be split (“you can keep all the users from A to M, and sell the folks from N to Z”?).

The normal competition remedies simply don’t work for this kind of business. So either we do give up, or do something else. In this case, I can’t see any alternative to a much more interventionist approach.

Wakey, wakey! The Competition & Markets Authority HQ in Canary Wharf

Who knew the railway had so much to teach social media?

Interoperability (the ability for different systems to work with each other) is the answer to the social media monopoly conundrum.

The railways have grappled with interoperability since the 19th century.

Each train company could be more agile if they did their own thing, just as each social network can be today. But it’s long been recognised that the benefits for individual firms are outweighed by the consequences for society. That’s why, even through the period of privatisation, much of the railway remained interoperable by regulation.

I have 800 followers on Twitter. That data needs to become portable. My user data, profile, social graph, historic posts and messages need to be able to be sucked out of Twitter and deposited into a rival platform. Yes, that means standards need to be agreed for all these things, but it would mean that I could simply switch on Blue Sky and get posting.

That wouldn’t address the fact that the Blue Sky user base is still a fraction of Twitter’s. So we also need communications interoperability. My posts on Blue Sky need to be visible to folks back on Twitter.

Then, just as people are free to read the Daily Mail or Guardian, so people can choose whichever social network they want. They will still have access to all the tweets and all the users, with the platforms competing on the ease of use, features offered and the way the algorithm presents posts. If you want to see more rioters, join Twitter. Other platforms are (or would be) available.

Bureaucracy

I cannot tell you how bizarre this feels as my first blog post since launching my new business.

My new business is all about helping organisations (maybe in the transport sector) learn some of the tricks of entrepreneurship that have enabled fast-growing firms to be fast-growing firms. You’d expect it to be all “move fast and break things”. Yet my first post is about regulation. The downside to interoperability is that it requires lots of agreement of standards, difficult negotiations, setting of contracts and consequent inflexibility. That’s hardly a “move fast” approach.

Well, apart from the fact that “move fast and break things” was Facebook’s approach (and doesn’t reflect the typical approach of most entrepreneurs), the fact remains that this is a question of balancing competing harms.

Like rail companies, there is an advantage to each social media operator being able to do its own thing.

But there is a greater societal advantage to interoperability.

Interoperability creates friction. But I don’t think anyone would abolish the London Travelcard / Oyster card system, even though it ties together multiple operators into a cumbersome system of interoperability. The benefits are too great.

Interoperability’s time has come

This is something that the social media industry has started to recognise. Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey (the founder of Twitter, replaced by Elon Musk), created Blue Sky as the anchor of a decentralised social media platform. Blue Sky visually looks a lot like Twitter, but under the hood, it’s designed with features like data portability, thanks to its underlying AT Protocol. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, an alternative, decentralized system where data is interoperable across participating platforms using the ActivityPub protocol. When you join Mastodon, you join a server that can communicate with other servers in the Fediverse. Threads will be joining the Fediverse imminently.

Unfortunately, Blue Sky and the Fediverse are not interoperable due to their different underlying protocols. It’s all very Betamax / VHS.

Blue Sky looks very like Twitter, but - under the hood - is decentralised and interoperable. Except that it's not interoperable with everything else...

Fix it, or else…

The social media industry should be given a chance to come up with a single solution to enable interoperability. Given two competing protocols already exist, the simplest answer would be for everyone to agree to support one of them. Crucially, this needs to include Twitter (and, therefore, Elon Musk).

I’m no fan of regulation for regulation’s sake and if the social media industry agrees to end its monopolistic characteristics, cool: no need.

But…

The state needs to retain the right to intervene.

We’ve been here before

However much social media libertarians tell you that regulating something like social media would be unprecedented, unacceptable or the end of civilisation, we’ve been here before.

People used to be locked into the first bank they used (typically the one based on their university campus) by the web of standing orders and direct debits that fed their accounts. Even if people wanted to move, it was just too hard.

The banks knew this and did nothing about it. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? So the Competition and Markets Authority stepped in and, in 2016, published a report proposing the implementation of Open Banking. This would force the nine largest UK banks to open up their data. The Government created an Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) to set the standards and make it happen. Even though these were national proposals and the OBIE was a national body, the Government worked closely with the EU (yes! In 2016!) to ensure compatibility with the work being done on the second Payment Services Directive.

As a result, open banking happened and I now bank with Starling, not NatWest.

I’m not saying regulation should be the first resort. The industry should be given the chance to fix their issues first. But it must be on the table.

Crazy libertarians

Let’s be honest: the reason why regulation isn’t being discussed is that it’s seen by the kinds of people who work in social media as absolutely horrific. Beyond the pale. A nightmare. In the last week, I have personally seen Silicon Valley types on LinkedIn describing sensible regulation as “communism”.

But it’s just not true.

It’s understandable that Venture Capitalists don’t like regulation. New business models often don’t fit the existing regulatory landscape. I have personal experience of this with my on-demand coach startup Sn-ap. The rules of the road simply weren’t designed for the kind of flexible pick-ups that we were offering. We never (ever!) asked our drivers to break the rules but we did stretch the spirit of them.

But here’s the crucial thing: while I was very happy doing this in order to get an exciting new business model established, had we survived the pandemic, I would have expected us to be regulated. And that would have been fine.

Venture Capitalists don’t like regulations because it is important for new business models to be given the chance to grow and flex without constraint. And VCs only work with new business models. But established businesses need regulating to benefit society. Last week’s horrific Grenfell report brought this home with terrible clarity. It turns out that one of the key contributors to the tragedy was a default assumption under the last Conservative Government that regulations were automatically a bad thing. As a result, necessary conversations about regulating building cladding did not take place.

Social media monopolies don’t want regulations because (to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies) they wouldn’t, would they? But we - citizens - should want them - because they’re needed.

In the meantime

Even if the Competition and Markets Authority springs into action right now (and I hope it does), this is all going to take a while. Meanwhile, our power lies in quitting Twitter, as - remember - we aren’t users of Twitter, we are Twitter. We are the product. It’s time to quit.

I’m going to be trying out both Threads and Blue Sky for a while. I’ll love you forever if you join one of them and follow me there. Here’s me on Threads and here’s me on Blue Sky. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Thomas

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