Taison or Messi: the future will tell who was better”.
The column by journalist from Rio Grande do Sul, Wianey Carlet, in the then Zero Hora, in 2009, became a classic on social networks.
Predictions are very difficult to make. It is for this reason that the internet becomes unbearable at any major event these days.
Forecasts of all kinds pop up at any cell phone opening, coming from experts or not on the subject in question.
Well-constructed analyzes by those who understand the subject, however diverse the conclusion may be, are even welcomed, with parsimony, to help in the construction of knowledge and to have an indication of what may or may not happen.
Most of the time, it’s impossible to know where things are going to go.
That’s why I’ll avoid making a half-hearted prediction about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The purpose of this text is to try to better define the current point of the social network.
Twitter, created in 2006, was innovative in many ways. The use of hashtags to aggregate common topics is one of them.
Easy one-button sharing of content has changed the way messages are delivered.
Initially called a microblog and with personal posts, it became a network to be well informed about everything.
The Arab Spring in 2010 brought Twitter into the pantheon of big tech. A series of revolutions on the African continent that toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt were boosted by the ease of dissemination of tweets.
It looked like Twitter would be dominant, but Facebook snapped up at the same time the king of social media space, reaching a staggering 2.6 billion active users.
Other networks came and became the next big thing, notably Instagram and TikTok, both of which have over a billion active users. Twitter, by leaps and bounds, maintains its 400 million.
Twitter, if it never entered that A-tier level of users, remained in the first division of influence.
Politicians, companies and artists often use Twitter to make important announcements.
Former US President Donald Trump, paradoxical as it may be, was important to Twitter. He was after all the most influential person in the world using the social network as an official journal. Other leaders followed suit, such as his Brazilian puppet Jair Bolsonaro.
The year 2016 marks the era in which the world woke up to disinformation on social media, with Brexit and the American elections – in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal would be discovered.
Misinformation was not born on social media. Not even with the internet.
Not to go too far, in the book “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, published in 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes a scene in which the old baby is inundated with malicious comments and conspiracy theories that would make aunts and uncles blush. Modern WhatsApp. It was fiction, but previous centuries are full of similar examples, like people burned in the Middle Ages.
It is undeniable, however, that platforms have become fertile ground for the proliferation of fake news, manipulation, hatred and personal attacks. And they took time to act.
With goodwill, we can say that the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a Trump-inflated mob, marks the rupture of platforms’ leniency with disinformation.
American democracy needed to be one step away from collapsing for the status quo to change.
Twitter has always been a lightning rod in this matter as it is the network where information circulates faster.
At times, it felt like he was solely to blame for misinformation on the internet.
The use of bots and automated accounts does not help improve the image.
At the same time, he took the lead in the domino effect that became Trump’s ban on social media.
In a way, the influence that Twitter has is increased. A recent survey by BTG Pactual showed that only 13% of respondents use Twitter to consume news about the Brazilian elections, a much lower rate than Youtube, Facebook and WhatsApp, and even behind TikTok, with 14%.
This is Twitter today. Take a test ride on the subway. Walk from top to bottom of the car while looking at cell phones. WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube and Spotify will be more guaranteed presences than Twitter.
It is worth remembering that Twitter recorded its first profit only in 2018, when it was already 12 years old. Profit and user growth are two chronic difficulties for the company.
This is far from meaning the network doesn’t matter. What Elon Musk, who becomes a network baron alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Yiming Zhang (of TikTok), does going forward will determine the direction the networks can go and how free speech and disinformation circulate. .
An eventual decline of Twitter will open up even more space for the Chinese invasion led by TikTok and accompanied by apps like Kwai, today much more innovative than Silicon Valley.
A new network that captures the 2020s zeitgeist could give it new impetus and perhaps make it a more livable place.
It is impossible to predict with what we know today.
The future will tell this story.
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
