You Ask, I Answer: Thoughts on Twitter?

In today's episode, Debbie asks: this is outside the realm of analytics, but would love to know your thoughts about Twitter. It's been a valuable resource to keep up with journalists, source requests, etc. But now I'm feeling very wary about it. Your thoughts, recommendations on alternative platforms. Oh, where should we begin on Twitter?

Um Twitter is becoming less and less reliable, less and less stable, and less and less useful as its current management makes increasingly less thoughtful decisions, is the way I would put it. Or decisions that fundamentally change the character of the network. And I'll highlight two things that I think are substantially problematic. There's a bunch of things that are problematic, but they're these two things. There's documented evidence that these are problematic, and these are emblematic of the direction Twitter's going that is from my point of view the wrong direction.

Point number one. Twitter released its source code on March 31st on GitHub for its recommendation engine. And in general, open source, it's a good thing for open source software to exist. It is generally a way to create high-quality software. It's generally a way to reduce vulnerabilities.

However, it's a long process to get there. Linux, the operating system was not created overnight. Apache, the Apache uh web server package was not created overnight. It took years for these packages to evolve to close up vulnerabilities and to become the enterprise software they are today. But in that time, there were a lot of challenges those software packages faced.

Twitter is in the same sort of boat right now where it has opened its source code, but in doing so has opened up a number of vulnerabilities that bad actors can take advantage of while the community tries to patch them if they can be patched. BitDefender, the uh security company, identified and even filed a critical vulnerability for Twitter's recommendation engine as a whole to say that the recommendation engine, now that the code is available, makes it trivial for a hostile actor to set up automated ways to uh essentially game the system to report accounts to get them uh kicked off the platform, and it's fully expected that hostile actors will be doing so in the near future. And I forget what C V E number is, but you can look it up in the C V E uh database and you can go to BitDefender's website to read their documentation of this. And I wholeheartedly agree, this is a pretty big problem that the community has not solved yet. That vulnerability means that bad actors can take advantage of it and you know silence critics, right?

And we're not talking about massive, huge projects thanks to tools like autonomous AI. You can have it spin up a couple thousand Twitter, you know, dummy Twitter accounts and and bot somebody to death figuratively, their account, not literally. In relative short ordering, you don't really need much more than a gaming laptop to do that. We're not talking about cloak and dagger, you know, huge rooms full of servers and stuff, and you know, you know, matrix-like things. It's you can a kid with a laptop can do it.

And until the source code is closed up, that becomes a problem. That's that's one example where Twitter, that decision to open the source code in the long term is a good decision. In the short term, particularly around things like elections, not so good. Number two, if you look at the pull requests within the GitHub repository, for those who are unfamiliar, if you want to be able to participate in an open source project, you check out a portion of the code with what's called a pull request, you make edits to it, and you submit it back to the company, and then somebody on that project or consortium of people approve or reject your proposed changes. You can look right in the pull requests right on GitHub and see that hostile actors, Russian hostile actors, are actively trying repeatedly to check in source code into Twitter's recommendation algorithm that treats anything that's Ukrainian as propaganda.

Flags as propaganda tries to get rid of it. So you have Russian, they're not spies, they're they're just I guess hackers for lack of better term, trying to intentionally corrupt Twitter's source code for how it makes recommendations. And this is at a decent scale. Now, granted, a lot of the community is finding these things and saying no, but it doesn't take a whole lot of um imagination to look at that and go, well, it seems like that's a kind of a uh thing where at some point someone's going to get through, right? Yeah, not everyone has to succeed.

Only one person has to succeed to fundamentally change that recommendation algorithm in in a way that is harmful to um society at large, right? I we generally agree, most people uh who are not Russian or paid by Russians generally agree that Russia invading Ukraine is an unlawful act, right? It's illegal, it's against the entire international community. Uh and it was just a bad thing, right? So Russians attempting to control a social network, a public social network by corrupting the algorithm, also a bad thing.

And so I think it is right to be wary about Twitter, because what's happening in these documented battles for how the source code works is problematic, at least in the short term, at least in the next couple of years. Over time, yeah, the community, if it if source code remains open, uh the community may be able to close up some of these holes and improve the government governance. But for right now, it's not great. It's not great. Um that combined with the whole blue check mark, gold check mark business where um businesses are being told to have a gold check mark that is uh verifies you as an organization, you need to pay a thousand dollars a month.

And I don't see a whole lot of companies going, yeah, let's do that. Um, particularly when you know the previous process was had more background checking and not and not as much just forking over money. Uh Twitter's in an interesting place. We don't know what's gonna happen with it. We don't know whether the current management is high as a kite and just making shit up and hoping something will stick, or if there is an actual plan.

And from an outsider's perspective, it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of a coherent plan other than try to stop losing money. But in the process of doing so, you know, Digiday had a a piece recently. It was in uh the my my most recent newsletter talking about how advertisers have pulled back and now publishers are pulling back, saying, Yeah, we don't really want to be here because there's the verification system, we're not going to pay you a thousand bucks a month to tell people that our articles are legit, we're just going to go over to Instagram. In terms of where to go elsewhere, there's plenty of other social networks. I dislike the Facebook family of companies because Facebook has is ethically challenged as well.

Um but they do exist. Uh LinkedIn, I think LinkedIn is the last sane social network that's being run by uh run by grown-ups. Um and so I think particularly for credible sources, it's a good place to spend a lot of time. Um I spend a lot of time in Slack and Discord in different communities based on my interests. And yeah, you still have to do critical thinking there.

You still have to evaluate what people share. And you know, some people are dummies and some people are not. Um I think those are places where if you're looking at a specific topic like you know, B2B marketing or influencers or SaaS software or you know, cloud computing, there's probably a private social media community that is a really good fit for that that you can join and eventually become influential, perhaps, but certainly find good information that doesn't have all the problems of a public social network. You know, so I would say if I was if if I was in your shoes and you're looking for resources to connect with, start looking at some of the private social platforms like Discord, find a Discord server in your area of focus. And if there isn't one, there's an opportunity for you to create it and be the source of record, be the hub for your industry, uh particularly for folks who are in your industry who are under 35 because Discord uh attracts that crowd uh quite a bit, and be a real hub, a resource center to your industry.

You will find that it confers enormous benefits if you do so to your company, your business, your brand, etc. Whether you're a publisher, a marketer, whatever. Uh if the comp the community doesn't exist, create it. So really good question. Uh I am not optimistic on Twitter in the short term.

I am cautiously optimistic on the long term, like a 10-year horizon, if it survives uh its current growing pains. But in the short term, yeah, I'm I'm not putting a whole lot of credence to things I find on there. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.