Minor powerlevel: I worked for a prominent market research company for a few years and developed software to analyze social media posts for trends, sentiment, network relationships, and so on. Twitter is literally useless for market analysis. We stopped paying for access to their "firehose" feed years ago when we realized this. At a few industry conferences that year, where company reps' lips tend to be more loose than usual, we found that our peers and competitors in the industry had reached the same conclusion. If you find a market research company that boasts they include Twitter in their internet-based analyses, they're full of shit, and you should run away very fast.
Twitter makes money by selling user data (including public posts) to interested third parties (like us). It's in their best interest (at least financially) to constantly grow their installed user base as much as possible to make the data they sell more valuable and attractive to buyers. The trouble is, they're lying about their real user count. They just tend to report two figures in their marketing efforts: total registered accounts in good standing, and total "active" accounts that have had any kind of activity (even just logging in once counts as "activity" for this purpose) in the past, say, year. And you have to nag them a bit to get that second figure. And it's always approximate.
And even that "total active accounts" figure is grossly overstated. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I know there have been studies and other efforts to quantify Twitter's actual user base, and an overwhelming majority of activity on Twitter is generated by bots, not humans, and among the activity produced by humans, something like 90% of that is produced by only 10% of the active human users (so-called "power users"). So not only is most of Twitter's traffic complete garbage generated by machines, but what comparatively little human-generated traffic flows through Twitter is almost entirely the product of just a tenth of those active humans. And as it turns out, that runs afoul of some very basic requirements for useful analysis -- sample size, demographics, geographic distribution, etc.
What this means in real terms is that almost
all of Twitter's content is trash. Unusable. No more interesting than static. And what's left is equally useless -- "power user"-flavored static. They're not even remotely representative of any kind of discernible market. That little sliver of 10% of human traffic that's generated by the other 90% of the real, active human user base is simply not big enough to yield a good enough sample size to perform a useful analysis.
Twitter knows all this. They certainly know they're selling a worthless product (we straight up told them, and so have others). They certainly know most of their traffic is generated by bots. They certainly know most of the remaining traffic is generated by a small number of "power users."
So what's Twitter's reaction to this? How do they try to counteract this trend and get more genuine human interaction on the platform from a broader range of humans? Widespread censorship (reducing overall human-generated traffic). Ban more humans over "hurt feelings." At a time when they desperately need more actual people using their site, they're enthusiastically shrinking their human user count and patting themselves on the back as they do it. It's aggressively self-destructive, but they're doing it anyway.
Obviously that's partly because they've gone full woke (which has consistently proven to be catastrophic to a company's bottom line once it metastasizes enough) and they're going all-in on beating Trump, but it's also partly because they're just really fucking stupid. They seem to care more about keeping the power users happy rather than attracting a broader user base and encouraging more users to be more active on the platform. What they don't seem to realize (but the market research industry figured out years ago) is that their power users are retards and nothing they have to say has any real value.
So this directly impacts their bottom line. Fewer paying customers are lining up to buy their data because we've all figured out it's worthless. Apart from their stock, that's their only source of income, and they're actively killing it. Wokeness doesn't pay the bills, and eventually Twitter is going to starve itself to death. Even if they pull a heel-face turn by stopping all censorship, ceasing manipulation of trends, stopping all the idiotic bans and enforcing their rules evenly and equally regardless of political bent, it's not salvageable at this point. They've permanently chased away too many people who will never come back no matter what.
Facebook is equally useless, but for a different reason. The Cambridge Analytics thing freaked them the fuck out, and they cut off everyone entirely and never let people back in. All you can do as far as "market research" on Facebook nowadays is paying to run ads for off-site surveys, and combining that data with whatever analytics Facebook provides for your ad buys. It's generally not worth it, so again, the industry stopped using Facebook.
The less said about Reddit, the better. It's worse than Twitter. Bots as far as the eye can see, and power users dominate the site.
And there's one last problem. Even if you could wave a magic wand and get a firehose from any of the big platforms that contains only legitimate, genuine, human-generated traffic, it's all so fucking left-leaning that you absolutely
cannot get a good read at all of public sentiment or trends. It's impossible. You can certainly determine
Twitter's sentiments on something, but it can't ever be squared with information coming from other proven survey methods (like opinion polls, phone surveys, online (controlled) surveys, etc.). It never lines up. It's so far removed from reality that it really isn't useful.
To be honest, behind closed doors, the industry pretty universally believes social media is worthless and has stopped focusing on it entirely. And as an aside, they're helping Trump win by keeping his name on everyone's lips and chasing off his supporters (who might otherwise actually help
temper that a bit), and they don't even realize it. And when he wins, they won't have any idea how it happened.
Censorship plays into all this. It further shrinks an already unusably-small user base by driving people away, and it destroys all efforts to accurately gauge sentiment and trends by reinforcing one specific set of opinions and skewing everything towards them. It's a great big echo chamber. It's already effectively useless for a broad swath of people, and it's getting worse by the day.
Everyone who gets pushed out of it just ends up going somewhere else. They don't just "disappear" from the world. They find new ways to communicate, and go back to using old ones. Churches, living rooms, backyard cookouts, bars, bowling alleys, gun ranges, parks, beaches, sports arenas and water coolers at the office are still major social gathering spots where all sorts of "leftist-incompatible" conversations happen well outside the censors' grasp (even with kung flu shutdowns, you can't stop people just walking next door to shoot the shit with their neighbors).
Marketers are
very interested in these people outside the bubbles. They actually spend money. They reliably vote. They have real jobs and accomplish real work. They don't "live" for social media and don't give a shit if they get kicked out. They just continue being productive members of society. The chaff inside the bubble? Not so much. Those people don't spend money, they frequently forget to vote (or are too lazy to bother), rarely work real jobs and rarely produce anything of value. The keepers of the bubbles don't really have much to offer the world except angry flash mobs, karens, and cancel culture. Those things don't sell products.
Facebook is only really useful anymore to most people as a way to stay in touch with family, share funny animal pictures and videos, and join knitting groups. Twitter's not useful for much of anything anymore besides virtue signaling. Same with Reddit. All three are
ripe for replacement by something better, whether that something exists today or not. MySpace seemed insurmountably popular -- too big to fail. But it did, despite its massive user base. Same with Digg. They made one (big) change to their site and alienated practically all their users overnight, and they mostly fled to Reddit, Fark and Metafilter. Youtube's equally ripe for replacement because of its continued slide into shitsville, but because what they do is so fucking expensive at that scale it's going to take a billionaire deciding to troll Google by bankrolling a free-speech competitor to make them sweat a little.
We joke about how funny it'd be if Trump were to announce he was leaving Twitter entirely to switch over to Gab. But that's exactly the sort of thing that could actually topple Twitter. His departure would absolutely devastate their traffic and user engagement. Even a good chunk of the bots there would fall silent because the fuckwits who run them all suffer from severe TDS and have focused all their attention on Trump's account, forsaking all other interests.
Yes, there'd be some virtual gravedancing and celebrations for a week or two, but that would quickly dwindle. And once people can't just give hot takes and add
@realDonaldTrump to it to drive up engagement and get attention, that will all die down. Remember Trump's posts all get tens of thousands of direct replies (at least) and just as many (if not more) retweets and quotes, all with their own message chains. If he moved to Gab and closed his Twitter account, that's potentially hundreds of thousands (or maybe even millions) of posts that wouldn't be made anymore simply because the focal point is gone.
Not to mention what a godsend that would be for Gab. Their traffic would skyrocket, and a lot of Trump's hecklers would bravely follow him there only to discover it's not quite as "ban-happy" as Twitter was, and then go to pieces when they catch endless shit from the kind of people they got banned from Twitter and can't do anything to stop it. And being the official social media home of the fucking POTUS would give Gab enough clout to go back to the payment processors, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc., and say "alright faggots, listen up, here's how it's gonna be" and get themselves "re-platformed."
That specific thing is not likely to happen, but it's exactly the
kind of thing that could take out a dominant player and give a competitor a leg up. It only takes one. And remember, there's a lot of really smart technical people out there who can build those competitors. They don't buy into the woke shit, and they don't work for Big Tech. They just need to pounce at the right moment when one of the big boys makes a big mistake or there's some kind of major shakeup, and they can swoop in and provide a refuge for all those fleeing users.
