Twitter’s feud with Trump could be a savvy business move
The social media founders promised utopias, where speech would be democratised and each of us would be given our voice in the public square.
Utopias, however, have always been tricky.
The term was coined by Thomas More in his 1516 work of the same name, and it was a pun that More’s learned readers would have shared in. The word has two possible Ancient Greek roots, and is intended to mean one or perhaps both of “eu-topia” (a “good-place”) and “ou-topia” (“no-place”).
In recent years, the social media utopia has indeed proved illusory. Debate has grown increasingly toxic, personified not least by the US President and Tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump.
The damage of this toxicity is societal — just look to America’s burning streets. But it is also a risk to the social media companies themselves. On a number of occasions, the advertisers who fund these platforms have taken fright and threatened to pull their spending. In 2018, Unilever’s then chief marketing officer betrayed the depth of advertisers’ concerns: online platforms are sometimes “little better than a swamp”, he said.
It now appears that Twitter might be the first to drain that swamp, with President Trump its first victim. Last week Twitter turned on its most famous user, placing hazard-warnings on his most misleading and inflammatory tweets.
The process was the latest in a series of changes at the micro-blogging site. In October, Twitter banned all political advertising on its platform.
The company’s actions have left Facebook, its nearest competitor, looking flat-footed by comparison. Facebook has been moving in the opposite direction entirely. Last year, it controversially stopped fact-checking political advertising, and Trump’s latest tweets have been left undisturbed when re-posted to Instagram.
The difference between the two companies’ approaches to policing the public square might be considered philosophical, and in that regard Facebook’s position is defensible. Mark Zuckerberg is right to voice concern that he, as a private individual, should not be able to exercise so much power as a censor.
But philosophy aside, this is bad politics — as Facebook is discovering from its increasingly restive staff, who have this week come out of the woodwork to publicly condemn Zuckerberg’s approach.
It might well be bad business too, as Twitter starts looking the less swampier home for advertising spending.
In this sense, the attention in recent days might have fallen on the wrong bellicose, Republican billionaire from New York. Late last year, Paul Singer, the activist investor and founder of Elliott Management, took a four per cent stake in Twitter.
His initial goal was to topple Twitter founder Jack Dorsey — and in that he failed. Employees in vast numbers took to Twitter (naturally) where they declared “#WeBackJack”, forcing a climbdown. Dorsey’s execution has now been stayed until 2021 at least.
Dorsey knows that he is on borrowed time. Twitter has underperformed its peers considerably — Facebook’s annual profits of $2 bn dwarf Twitter’s at $390m. Dorsey has personally been criticised for running both Twitter and Square, a payments firm he founded, and there have been curious moments of managerial oversight at Twitter. Last year, a software bug in its advertising platform cost the company tens of millions of dollars, by its own admission.
Dorsey’s determination to clean up Twitter might therefore have more to do with Singer than it does Trump. By taking on the latter, Dorsey knows that he is taking a risk — indeed, in response to his partial muzzling, the President has threatened to “shut down” social media.
But doing so could be the Twitter chief’s masterstroke. While Trump longs to make Dorsey’s utopian dreams “no place”, getting tough on toxicity may enable Twitter to truly be a “good place” — and so a better business too.
Main image credit: Getty