The Death of Twitter and Generalized Identity
Why the death of Twitter will hurt the right, and how left-of-center culture failed to see the incoming right-ward shift of non-white voters due to who they listen to.
Twitter is dying and it deserves to die. The website is now trafficked by Nazis and incels who pay money to float their content to the top of everyone’s page. It’s now used by foreign adversaries who pay Elon Musk to push propaganda to the forefront of American discourse. The timeline has become a ghost town, dominated by paid content inflated by bots, with fewer and fewer humans engaging.
Elon Musk bought Twitter because it was a powerful hub of left-wing thought, and he thought that by converting it into a right-wing social media website that the right would conquer the cultural realm. When Elon degraded the site’s usability, professionals, politicians and reporters left the website for meritocratic algorithms like Bluesky’s or less biased TikTok.
Old Twitter was a powerful source of cultural discourse because all relevant cultural figures from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders used Twitter at the height of its popularity in the late-2010s. Today, even Trump’s tweets which were once ominous and cloaked in mystery is now unimportant and copy-pasted from his TruthSocial echochamber. The intellectuals left of center have largely vacated the platform. “X” as Musk calls Twitter, is mostly a disinformation spam website and will go the way of Facebook.
But what Elon fails to understand is that Twitter was both a blessing and a curse for the left and liberals, and his takeover may not aid the right in the long run. Twitter was a blessing in that it allowed for obscure left-wing ideas grow with extreme popularity. Defund The Police or Police Abolition started off as anarchist ideology, which was long relegated to libertarian left groups and Black academics but blew up into the national discourse and popularity by left-wing Twitter users. The Twitter video of George Floyd being murdered by a police officer ignited it. A lot of national discourse and protests between 2016 and 2022 basically started with videos or events posted on Twitter. The husk of Twitter today will never see content of that importance ever again.
But the curse of Twitter is that many of these ideas proved to be unpopular or not as important as Twitter led the nation’s culture to believe, especially among the communities Twitter users often spoke on behalf of. Black people in aggregate disapproved of abolishing police departments or engaging in police staffing cuts. But media and academic institutions didn’t understand this because they took cultural cues from many Black people on Twitter who skewed way more left-wing. There’s a reason Congressman James Clyburn and other Black reps were freaking out to Biden after his 2020 win the Defund movement.
Twitter was over-represented by a section of college-educated, young minority and marginalized groups whose opinions were valid but weren’t necessarily representative of their identity in aggregate. Another example would be Asian American intellectuals and Twitter posters staunchly defending Affirmative Action in publications and Democratic parties, only for Asian voters to vote it down in California. It doesn’t mean that college-educated, online and young people shouldn’t be heard, but when discussing these topics they should be understood as a particular viewpoint and not always the total viewpoint of their identity.
Journalists and prominent pundits, whose work trickles down to consultants, politicians and corporations, sometimes got lazy and used Twitter’s cultural salience as a substitute for understanding communities holistically. Take “BIPOC” (Black. Indigenous. People of Color”). This term was started by a clique of non-white social science academics and Twitter activists who wanted to designate Black people and Native Americans as unique and different in American experiences from all other “people of color” who are of immigrant ancestry.
I’m sympathetic to the intent behind the term as “people of color” was being used inappropriately when usually it referred to one particular minority group that didn’t have much in common with other groups. The term BIPOC was very unclear in its meaning (was in inclusive of Asians and Hispanics or exclusive?), but since it took off on Twitter, it took off in media reporting, and then it became dominant in corporate documentation, consultant groups, diversity training etc. When in reality, very few people who are Black, Indigenous, Latino, Asian or anything else calls themselves a BIPOC.