Social-media researchers overemphasized the platform now called X for years. But now, as it rapidly changes into something new and frightening, we risk paying too little attention.
Twitter's influence has always been overstated by the media type, and the personalized recommendation algorithm it used has always been a black box to be gamed, and what this article really showed is that it is an inheritly unfair game and the people who writes the rules of the platform (in this case, Musk), can push whatever hot take they want to push to influence public opinion, and people who don't have that level of access to Twitter will brute force follower with bots in the hopes that it'll lure more real users to influence.
So, dead internet theory and all, until we fully automate Twitter to bots influencing bots. There is no authenticity anymore, it's all disinformation from all sides.
Nowadays, I like to pretend that I never had a Twitter or Insta. Not a healthy way of coping, I know, but it's way less stressful that way.
Didn't the mods say they were going to do something about musk/Twitter spam?
This isn't even about something Twitter did
This isn't even about something Twitter might do
This is just a dude talking about what everybody knows about Twitter. And musk fans upvote anything Twitter, and musk haters upvote this out of a sense of validation that is shit.
Voting is not good for this, please ban the musk spam
I've never used Twitter, nor liked it, but in 2010 I had to observe that it was indeed useful when it became one of the primary ways for people to communicate during the Arab Spring.
Since then I kept not being into it, but at least I thought it had some important value I had not seen.
Now it's all locked up, so it really has become useless (and I haven't even talked about the rampant disinformation)
The subhead is important in getting the gist of this article "study it now." Meaning the ridiculous amount of research on Twitter was dumb for awhile, but now that it's changing it might be worth looking at.
They also point out why it's not going to happen
Refocusing on studying X won’t be easy. It will require new methods and approaches that do not depend on the large amounts of data that were easily accessible before.
The API access was what made it so heavily studied and the current costs are why this change isn't going to be low hanging fruit for researchers to pump papers out on.