As the novelty of Twitter pre-Musk and Twitter post-Musk has clearly worn off, and the waves of bots pulsate in a paroxysm or rhythmic rigor mortis, the current state of digital interaction dissolves into obscurity.
The once innovative platform embracing visceral reactions and abbreviated thought over thoughtful and pondering fact, has reached an impasse in encountering attrition and a stagnation of content. While the environment was optimal for reactionary politics benefiting the left of center causes in sharing only a fraction of the story, critics were still insistent that the Trump factor marred the electronic community, even though the egotistical megalomaniac was banned from the site for a significant duration.
Musk’s latest directive is to monetize the infamous “Blue Check Mark” validation system in charging users $8 a month to legitimize their accounts, and business entities $1000 to have the iconic logo associated with their accounts. The gesture has not gone over well with the corporatized media, as the New York Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post and other liberal news organisms have hinted to Tesla’s founder that they won’t pay, even though the algorithms on the app have benefit leftist posts spanning the history of the brand. As Musk attempts to gravitate from relying on Fortune 500 advertisers from generating revenue for the privately-traded public entity, the numbers clearly show that traditional marketing should probably be phased out pertaining to social networks and other online ventures contingent on immersion from the end user.
The numbers are staggeringly muted. According to Statista.com, the food and beverage vertical market dominated advertising expenditures on Twitter in 2020, headlined by the Nestle corporation and Coca-Cola. In the wake of CEO Jack Dorsey’s realm abruptly ending, the company apparently lost half of its top-100 advertisers, as corporations caved into the snarky trendiness of the woke movement, even though the online community is saturated by progressive artificial intelligence which bombard any reasonable tweets and subsequent responses with a toxic negativity and ridicule worthy an unemployed Left coast hipster pontificating through a device at a local coffee shop which refuses service to law enforcement, yet demands protection and security during an uprising. A number of advertisers literally shaved their digital marketing expenditures on the app from hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of one meal at an exclusive steak house.
While government subsidies and advertising buys duct tape the broken financial framework of the world’s now third most prodigious social media destination, Musk’s attempt to infuse the organization with capital that is not contingent on agreements and stipulations with an asterisk, the fabricated environment of the pixilated realm has chased away many account holders. With TikTok and the militant arm of Beijing indoctrinating the younger generations in the West, the edgier platform, along with critics ridiculing the restoration of Trump’s Twitter account, a mass exodus has been ongoing since late 2022.
The original psychology surrounding engagement on Dorsey and colleague’s site was based on the 1980’s daytime television talk show formula of featuring controversy, polarizing individuals, and outlandish topics to incite reactionary emotional responses. The viewer was driven to either love or hate the host and guest with nothing in between, an emotional roller-coaster ride which captivated a large and diverse audience.
Fast forward forty years later and these same actors are now the pesky bots which inhabit the micro-climate driving traffic on Twitter, but now outnumber organic end-users and exist as disruptors in sparking ideological conflict. A recent tweet by champion swimmer Riley Gaines bashing ESPN celebrating and profiling transgender athlete Lia Thomas in dominating the pool against female competitors, was lambasted by a calvary of automated alter egos, the backlash meticulous and concise, in viewing the strategic assault on Gaines’s opinion through unbiased research.
Dissecting the bot attack on the 12-time All-American and the related timeline exemplifies the cold-blooded and disturbing presence of programmable smart software along with the slanted human element populating the variables in the equation that constitutes electronic propaganda, is much an indictment of Twitter account holders as well as the corporate leadership. Unfortunately, the majority of individuals who still actively post on the app are oblivious to the fact that behaviors are subtlety being altered within an ecosystem where consequences and accountability do not exist.
The future shock of the information age is descending upon the fabric society, and no defense mechanism is in existence to change the caustic trajector.