If anything symbolizes the end of Twitter, it’s the rise and fall of Oprah Winfrey’s account.

Oprah joined the platform in 2009. First time tweeting Live from her popular TV show “HI TWITTERS. Thank you for the warm welcome. It feels very 21st century.”

Queensland University of Technology Digital Media Research Center Professor Axel Brands said it was a “landmark moment” for the platform.

“That was really the moment when the numbers skyrocketed.”

Oprah still has an account under the renamed X with 41.7 million followers. But since November 2022, a month after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the site was completed, she posted: Just once – In January 2023, she told Chelsea Clinton that she was “still laughing so hard 😂” about Clinton accidentally wearing two different black shoes at an event.

Debate over X reignited last week after the Australian government took the platform to court to force it to remove a video of a Sydney bishop allegedly being stabbed while leading a church service.

Company X says it complied with the order to delete the footage of the stabbing (though, ironically, just below the post announcing its compliance is a comment saying someone had shared the full graphic video) Musk has been harshly critical of Australia’s request to delete the footage. We asked Mr. X for comment.

But as debate intensifies over what responsibility social media platforms have to stop the spread of violent or extremist content, other questions are emerging. “What is Twitter/X anymore?”

What happened to the site, once a staple of the news cycle and political debate, now increasingly abandoned by those who once religiously followed it?

The beginning: “Utopian vision”

A former Twitter Australia employee, who requested anonymity, said Twitter had lofty goals in its early days.

“I think it was definitely a utopian vision at the time. Like many of these founders, they really thought they were disruptors and creating a space for real public debate. “I was thinking about it,” she says. “I think people really enjoyed it at the time. It was a very fast-moving, innovative platform where you could get the latest news and follow and connect with people you really admired. Even in the early days, it always had parts of it as a toxic swamp, but not entirely.”

“It had a social profile,” she says. “Remember when everyone was obsessed with the existence of blue ticks and pretended that people who didn’t have them didn’t care?”

Although the exact number of monthly active users is unknown, Twitter/X has had a significant impact on the world of news and politics over the years, although it has not had the broad mainstream appeal of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or TikTok. I did.

“It’s a very specific, limited audience,” Brands says. “But the types of audiences that could be reached on Twitter were journalists, politicians, activists, and various forms of experts. Often people who were influential in other communities online and offline.”

Belinda Barnett, senior lecturer in media and communications at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, said: In essence, it has become a must-have tool, especially for journalists. ”

This was also because Twitter’s features, especially @mentions and hashtags, are well-suited for breaking news.

For example, Twitter became big in Japan in part because people turned to Twitter as a way to communicate and organize when the country was hit by a devastating tsunami in 2011, said a former Twitter user. Employees speak.

“It became a real lifeline for people and a way for people to be rescued,” she said.

According to a 2021 Pew study, 69% of U.S. Twitter users said they got their news from the site, 46% said the site gave them a better understanding of current events, and 30% said the site made them more interested in politics. They responded that they felt more involved.

The breaking news feature was not without its problems. The immediacy of this platform gave voice to dissidents and citizen journalists, which was crucial for uprisings like those seen in the Arab Spring, but it also allowed politicians to bypass traditional journalistic mediation. Bruns says it’s now possible.

“There are quite a few politicians who have essentially stopped giving interviews to journalists, leaving them exposed to critical questions and basically just posting their announcements on Twitter.”

Barnett said misinformation and trolls have always been a problem, but the company is committed to what she calls the “three pillars”: user blue checkmarks, moderation policies, and trust and safety. team.

“All of these things worked together to give us some credibility during breaking news, so people went there. Twitter in the old days certainly spread misinformation, but it started trending before it spread.” I often ended up crushing it,” she said.

Now: Musk’s Wild West

Barnett said all three pillars were quickly dismantled after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022.

The trust and safety teams were among those who were abruptly fired within weeks of Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company, showing up to work at headquarters with a ceramic sink on their first day. A video of Mr. Musk’s entrance was posted on the site with the caption, “Let it sink in.”

Many people who were blocked from the site for violating online rules, including Donald Trump, had their accounts reinstated (although Trump’s account was later blocked again).

The verification process has changed dramatically. Instead of being given blue ticks for being a celebrity or working for a popular news site, you can now buy them.

My approach to moderation has also changed. Mr. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as a bastion of free speech.

“They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of arbitration,” Brands said. “To some extent, this reflects the broader sense that free speech in the United States is an absolute good above all else. On the other hand, in Australia, Europe, and many other regions, the right to free speech and protection from harmful speech are And that would essentially sound like censorship to many otherwise very liberal people in the United States.”

Ironically, in 2022, X suspended the accounts of people who criticized Musk, including those of several prominent journalists from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. account has been banned Track the whereabouts of your private jet using public data.

“Elon wants it both ways,” Barnett says. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was certainly absolutely critical to the news cycle,” but he also wants to “remove the pillars and processes that Twitter has spent years building up and make it more… We also want it to promote community. ”

“I think it’s becoming a toxic mess,” Barnett says.

The future: a place out of control

A Pew study found that 60% of U.S. Twitter users left the platform for more than a few weeks in the first few months after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. A quarter of those surveyed said they had not used the site at all in the past year.

Even the most prolific tweeters saw their use of the platform decrease, with the number of tweets per month dropping by 25%.

Whether this trend continues is a difficult question to answer, but one reason is that it has become prohibitively expensive for researchers studying social media to continue their work under Musk. That’s what happened.

For many years, Twitter has provided application programming interfaces (APIs) to academic researchers and private sector organizations for a fee. About a year ago, the cost of accessing these APIs skyrocketed.

Aaron Smith, director of Pew’s Data Lab, said the center has developed a “pretty rich body of research” on Twitter over the years, but that access to the API is now limited due to the price increase for accessing Tweets. He said that such annual fees have become expensive. “It’s bigger than our team’s entire research budget for several years” – they couldn’t do any more research on the platform.

Bruns says academics are in the same position. “We cannot conduct particularly exploratory research, such as looking for hate speech bots or misinformation on the platform. [X] Almost priced out of the market. ”

This is unfortunate, as academic research on Twitter has shown that the platform was able to identify and dispel some hate speech and misinformation in the past, but will now go even further unchecked. he says.

“Certainly, it’s already starting to turn into platforms like Gab and Parler and things like that. [Trump’s] In True Social, people on the far right vehemently agree with each other and ferociously hate everyone else. ”

Even former employees have since deactivated their accounts. “I think it’s a really dangerous space right now and it’s out of control,” she says.

“I miss it sometimes. I always thought this was a great newswire for journalists and citizen journalists…I don’t know, but I found myself sitting watching breaking news and wondering where to go. There’s a hole left, and I’m hoping someone will try to fill that gap.”