Elon's Big Blue Bird

Twitter was founded in 2006 and went public in 2013, meaning that the blue bird app has been a publicly-traded company for the majority of its existence. We are talking about the same platform that silenced a president, the same app at the center of political scandals, civil revolts, and new internet economies.

I am going to start this article by making a bold claim. Twitter, which started as a simple and innocent text-based social network, has now become the most important asset in the world, which is why the richest person ever just paid over $44 Billion to take it private again.

Our media landscape looked very different before Dorsey co-founded Twitter back in 2006. Before social media, as we know it, people used to be social online only through public web forums, chat rooms, and e-mails. This means that there were millions of disconnected conversations happening in a million different places. After Facebook and Twitter came into popularity, the conversation/information market share started accumulating towards the top networks. 

Facebook grew up as the digital version of your physical social life, a platform in which you friended people you actually knew, and the content in your feed was about people in your social circle. Facebook created another layer of connection for those already connected. Twitter, on the other hand, connected the disconnected. We’ve never met most of the people we interact with on Twitter because Twitter is more than a social network, it’s a topic network. What connects users with one another is the topics they are interested in, not their social circles. 

That is one of the main reasons why Twitter is the most powerful asset in the world: the fact that it has the power to bring people together under shared ideologies. It sounds obvious now, but back then nobody thought Twitter would become the political, and economical lever that it is today. 

The signs were clear when Obama won back in 2008. Back then, he had the most followed account in the platform, and his team largely credits their social media efforts as instrumental to his election campaign. No politician would ever dare to run for office without using social media after that. Then a few years later, the same app proved to be instrumental in toppling dictator regimes across the Middle East. People were able to organize like never before in order to change the status quo of their country. Now, it’s no wonder why most social movements today begin with hashtags. 

Today, Ukrainians are using Twitter to organize themselves against invading Russians. Politicians use it to understand public sentiment and spread political messages. Journalists use it to break relevant news. Bad actors use it to spread misinformation campaigns. Scientists use it to fight misinformation and share breakthroughs. Developers use it to promote cryptocurrencies and NFTs and I use it to stay informed about marketing trends. Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of different people.

Now with people linking Twitter to the spread of hate speech, fake news, and violence, the company is dealing with a massive ethical liability dilemma. The platform that was started to further free speech now paradoxically finds itself censoring tons of accounts and flagging information for containing controversial keywords. This brings me to a tweet Musk posted right after the acquisition was officially announced. He said: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”.

Elon understands that Twitter is not just a social network like Instagram or LinkedIn, it is a completely different animal, one with the power to make or break democracies. The platform is a simple open message broadcasting protocol and as Naval Ravikant said, all protocols converge on a winner-takes-all monopoly. A protocol monopoly that dictates who gets their voice heard and who gets it silenced. A protocol monopoly that can overthrow governments. 

It’s no wonder why rich powerful people want to control such a powerful asset as Twitter is. This isn’t the equivalent of Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, Twitter’s acquisition is the equivalent of buying the newsstand where the Washington Post is being displayed and not just that newspaper, but almost every other newspaper, magazine, podcast, article, or type of media content out there. By buying Twitter, Elon now owns the town square where everybody on the internet wants a voice.