Interview with Prof. Axel Bruns – The anniversary of Twitter/X “marks a bittersweet moment in social media history”

Scientists, politicians, media professionals, and institutions are increasingly turning their backs on the microblogging platform X, ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X. They criticize the new owner for actively promoting right-wing extremism and conspiracy theories and regard the platform as lost. That wasn’t always the case; Twitter used to be a platform of exceptionally lively exchange, socially, politically, professionally and privately. In the expert interview with Axel Bruns, who has studied and used Twitter in many ways, we trace this evolution.

Wissenschaftler*innen, Politiker*innen, Medienschaffende und Institutionen kehren dem Kurznachrichtendienst X zunehmend den Rücken seit Elon Musk das Portal Twitter übernommen und in X umbenannt hat. Sie beklagen die aktive Förderung von Rechtsextremismus und Verschwörungstheorien durch den neuen Betreiber und halten die Plattform für verloren. Das war nicht immer so. Twitter war eine Plattform des außerordentlich regen Austauschs, sowohl gesellschaftlich wie politisch als auch beruflich und privat. Im Experten-Interview mit Axel Bruns, der Twitter in vielen Facetten genutzt und beforscht hat, zeichnen wir diesen Weg nach.

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GESIS Blog: Dear Professor Bruns, thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview with us about the anniversary of Twitter/X. You are considered one of the leading experts in the field of research on social media platforms, and you have extensively studied X, formerly known as Twitter. What is your perspective on the platform’s 20th anniversary?

Bruns: This anniversary marks a bittersweet moment in social media history. There are not so many platforms that make it to this point, so to an extent this validates the Twitter concept itself as a meaningful format of what social media can be: a flat, open, largely public network of accounts where pretty much anyone can follow and interact with anyone else, where accounts communicate with relatively short messages that may also contain links or media objects, and where communication is therefore often very fast-paced and reacts swiftly to live events in the world. This is notably different from the mostly private, small-world reciprocal networks of Facebook, the image- and video-centric communication of Instagram or TikTok, or the private messaging of WhatsApp, for instance – Twitter’s forms and formats of communication are distinct, and it addresses a specific communicative need and niche that at the time of its launch no other platform addressed.

But at the same time, if we’re honest, the Twitter I just described also didn’t make it to its twentieth anniversary: following the takeover and comprehensive restructuring of the platform under Elon Musk, that Twitter no longer exists, and even the name ‘Twitter’ itself has been replaced by ‘X’. And X still looks a little like the Twitter of old, but so much of what made Twitter relevant, important, and influential in the global communications landscape has been dismantled by now. This anniversary, therefore, is also an important opportunity to reflect on what we’ve lost, how and why we’ve lost it, how we might rediscover some of what we’ve lost in other places, and what can be done to prevent such situations from happening again with other important platforms for public debate.

GESIS Blog: With Twitter’s rebranding to X, do you think we’re truly celebrating the platform’s 20th birthday this week, or has it fundamentally become something new?

Bruns: A very simple way to put it is that we’re celebrating the successes of the first decade of Twitter’s existence and lamenting the many and often self-inflicted failures of the second. Twitter didn’t become what it was in its heyday overnight: it started from a good and simple idea – the public and open short-message network which launched in March 2006 – and gradually grew into what it became by incorporating many ideas that didn’t originate from its developers, but from its users: these include Twitter search, the retweet, and – perhaps most influentially – the hashtag. To its credit, early Twitter did what smart platforms should always do: they keep a close eye on how their users are inventing new usage practices and make it easier for them to engage in those practices. In this way, users and developers effectively co-design the platform.

The result was a platform that users actually wanted to be on, and that attracted more and more active participants. It was a platform that played a critical role in public communication, breaking news events, social movements, culture and sports fandom, and so many other contexts – from the San Diego wildfires in 2007 that hashtags were first used for through the 2009 Hudson River emergency landing of flight UA1549 to the Arab Spring, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter movements or the live-tweeting of Eurovision, World Cup finals, and so much more. In those moments, Twitter was the place to go for current information and commentary on unfolding events; at other times, it hosted large and small communities of interest around any number of mainstream and niche topics; and throughout it was also a place where you could simply hang out and socialise with your friends and contacts, sharing thoughts, ideas, information, jokes, memes, and everything else.

“Twitter became a new battleground in ideological struggles around the world.”

But such demonstrable success also attracted plenty of unwanted attention: from the early to mid-2010s onwards, Twitter and its userbase were also targeted more and more by spammers, trolls, bots, influence operations, and other so-called ‘bad actors’. Where this had political rather than commercial motivations, some of it was almost certainly driven at least in part by concerns about the way that Twitter had enabled prosocial groups to organise and coordinate. To be clear here: the simplistic idea that the Arab Spring, for example, had been a ‘Twitter revolution’ was always lazy journalism – but this doesn’t take away from the important role that Twitter and other social media platforms had played in helping Arab Spring activists both to organise on the ground and to get their message out to world audiences. Clearly, this presented a serious threat to oppressive regimes and their allies around the world, and so the backlash began; their efforts were directed both at undermining the ability of such prosocial activists to coordinate, and to learn from those efforts in the promotion of their own propaganda efforts. Twitter became a new battleground in ideological struggles around the world.

Additionally, sadly, this coincided with a serious decline in leadership within Twitter itself. Where previously, during the early growth of the platform, its leaders often listened to and took inspiration from the userbase, now they increasingly ignored their users or even actively worked against their interests. Rather than supporting the efforts of users to develop collective block lists that could exclude accounts which were known to be problematic, Twitter made it as difficult as possible to use these lists; rather than suspending or banning users who had repeatedly posted disinformation or hate speech, Twitter held fast to a particularly simplistic American understanding of ‘free speech’ at any cost; and – importantly for us in the research community – rather than working with leading scholars with deep expertise in the study of problematic online activities, Twitter reduced their access to data from the platform.

Much of the blame for this must be attributed to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and the rest of the leadership: Dorsey had only ever had the one good idea – for the original Twitter concept – but has increasingly styled himself as some kind of social media guru with superior insight into what users really wanted or needed. This growing disconnect from reality is at the heart of Twitter’s gradual decline during its second decade: while Twitter leaders introduced various new features over the years, those were never the ones that Twitter users were actually calling for – and the changes that Twitter users wanted (an edit button for tweets; collective block lists; more action against accounts spreading abuse, hate, and disinformation) were never addressed. The writing was on the wall for Twitter as early as 2016, when it became a key conduit for disinformation related to the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, and things only got worse from then on. In some ways, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter – with a fulsome endorsement from Jack Dorsey, of course – was only the inevitable conclusion of a long decline caused by neglect, mismanagement, and a fatal misunderstanding of what had made Twitter a great platform in the first place.

“If I ever regretted leaving Twitter, any brief look at what X has now become would quickly cure me of that feeling […]”

GESIS Blog: Many German research institutes and universities – including GESIS – left the platform for political reasons following Elon Musk’s takeover and the transformation of Twitter into X. As a result, we lost many followers and our reach decreased significantly. You have also stopped using Twitter/X. Do you sometimes regret your decision, and have you found an alternative platform that has the same impact?

Bruns: If I ever regretted leaving Twitter, any brief look at what X has now become would quickly cure me of that feeling; there’s no trace left there any more of what the platform once was. But I do mourn that old Twitter: before it became toxic, it could be a lively, fast-paced, fascinating, and informative place like no other. Twitter was where I first found out about breaking political news, about the 2013 Sendai tsunami, about the death of David Bowie, about new publications by key colleagues; it was where I found community with similar research, musical, and sporting interests. Even in its decline, it was still a key source of up-to-date information during the 2019/20 Australian bushfire crisis, and in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the wars in Ukraine, in Gaza, and most recently in Venezuela and Iran that is no longer the case: any genuine information is drowned in a flood of far-right talking points, bot posts, and AI slop.

There is nothing that has quite replaced this, and in this changed communicative environment we now find ourselves in, perhaps nothing ever will; indeed, to simply replace Twitter with something that merely mimics Twitter would ultimately mean stagnation. Personally, I have explored both Mastodon and Bluesky as the most Twitter-like platforms currently available, and found that Bluesky most resembles the Twitter that was, with a few smart features added: the curated ‘starter packs’ of accounts in specific fields of interest that new users can choose to follow have proven extremely useful in quickly finding interesting accounts, and the platform’s attitude towards collective block lists and its response to bad actors are a lot more enlightened than old Twitter’s ever was. Both Mastodon and Bluesky also operate on protocols that support federation across multiple servers with their own rules; for Bluesky this is still in its infancy, but I’m curious to see how this will play out for the relatively recent Eurosky project.

GESIS Blog: What was your favorite feature on Twitter/X?

Bruns: Without a doubt the flat and open structure of the platform. This was very different from Facebook and its cliquish reciprocal ‘friending’ approach, which of course originated from Facebook’s origins as a platform for university students in the United States, and their deeply ingrained fraternity and sorority culture of in- and out-groups. On Twitter, virtually anyone could follow anyone else, without requiring permission, and even try to strike up a conversation with them; for me, this was always a much more attractive and egalitarian proposition.

GESIS Blog: Focusing your research on Twitter/X, what first inspired you to study Twitter?

Bruns: In some ways, this was a logical progression in my research as much as my own platform uses: I had been – and still am – a blogger, and had done some research on the blogosphere and other forms of individual and collective self-publishing, including various citizen journalism platforms and initiatives, and as blogging was overtaken by the next generation of social media platforms including MySpace, Facebook, and then Twitter, many of the more public communication activities especially in the citizen journalism field moved to Twitter and its spaces for public debate more than Facebook and its smaller private environments. And of course, the fact that Twitter at least in its early days provided fairly generous access to public communication data on its platform also proved attractive to me and many other colleagues in my field.

GESIS Blog: How has your approach to researching Twitter/X changed over the years?

Bruns: That generous data access I just mentioned did not last, unfortunately – so over the years we were forced repeatedly to come to terms with sometimes very rapid changes to Twitter’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the official pipelines for accessing Twitter data. Happily, within the research community there were a number of groups around the world which not only developed important tools for gathering data from the various iterations of the Twitter APIs, but also shared those tools publicly under open-source licences. And of course over time our methods for analysing such data also grew increasingly sophisticated; here, my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre also made a number of key contributions, from our early attempts to extract various standardised metrics from Twitter datasets to more sophisticated tools for detecting potentially problematic coordinated activities on the platform.

GESIS Blog: What was the most influential Twitter/X moment in your field?

Bruns: One of the most important things that my team and I managed, with a great deal of effort, was to identify and map the entirety of the Australian Twittersphere, as it was in 2016. This provided us with genuinely unprecedented insights into the types of actors and communities that were represented there (and those in Australian society that were not), into their affinities and connections with each other, and into how that structure had grown over time: who had been early adopters, who had come later, and how information moved across that network. We later repeated this approach for the Norwegian Twittersphere, and my colleague Felix Münch who now works at GESIS developed an updated method for an analysis of the German-language Twittersphere, but I’m not aware of any other national Twitterspheres that were analysed comprehensively in this way. If we still had access to such data now, it would be fascinating to see how many of the accounts that were active in 2016 have since been discontinued.

GESIS Blog: What is the most surprising or memorable finding from your Twitter/X research?

Bruns: Mapping the Twittersphere, it was fascinating to see what communities of users were represented there – including a number which, not being a member of those communities myself, I was simply unaware of. For a few years, for instance, there was a very large teenage community on Twitter in Australia, centred around fandom for bands like Five Seconds of Summer; I genuinely didn’t expect it to be as prominent as it was. Also, when we subsequently explored posting activities in the Australian Twittersphere, it quickly became clear that in spite of the prominent role Twitter hashtags had assumed in public debate well beyond Twitter itself, hashtagged content on Twitter actually accounted only for a small percentage of tweets: a substantial part of what Twitter was used for had always been genuinely social media – hanging out and chatting with friends and connections online, rather than participating in specific hashtagged conversations. Such social and phatic uses have remained underrepresented in Twitter research, also because the functionality of the Twitter API made it a great deal easier to gather hashtagged than non-hashtagged conversations on the platform.

“[…] Twitter has also shown that social media matter, for better or for worse, in the formation and expression of public opinion.”

GESIS Blog: How has Twitter/X influenced public discourse, politics, or activism over the past 20 years? Can you share notable examples where Twitter/X has had a measurable impact on society?

Bruns: I’ve mentioned a few of them earlier: activist movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and many others have certainly drawn on Twitter to great extent both for their own organisation and to get their messages out to the broader public and especially also to the journalists and news organisations that covered them. This is not to say that these were Twitter movements, of course – but they managed to capture public attention especially also through their visibility on Twitter. The hashtag played an absolutely key role in all of this, of course – so much that it has arguably outlived Twitter itself, in fact: even now we see public demonstrations (against ICE arrests or the Iran war in the US, for example) where the messages on participants’ placards contain hashtags, even if those hashtags are no longer used in any real way to organise those demonstrations.

More generally, of course, Twitter has also shown that social media matter, for better or for worse, in the formation and expression of public opinion. That realisation has turned out to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, this has shown citizens that their own actions can matter in public debate, and has encouraged many of them to push for change in the things they feel strongly about; on the other hand, however, it has also emboldened interested groups both at the grassroots of society and in organised political networks to exploit social media platforms in pushing their propaganda and disinformation, at times encouraged and supported by well-resourced domestic and foreign actors. This is a development which is not limited to Twitter alone, of course; many social media platforms are now swamped by influence campaigns, not least also since modern AI technologies have made their production so much easier. As much as early Twitter reinvigorated public debate, therefore, late-stage Twitter (and a Twitter leadership which failed to take decisive action against this) damaged it by providing an environment where unscrupulous influence and disinformation campaigns could thrive.

GESIS Blog: How do you envision the future of X in terms of its role in online communication and social media landscapes?

Bruns: X itself has no future, other than as a hangout for bots, trolls, abusers, extremists, and even literal fascists; even if Elon Musk sold it tomorrow, it is now irredeemable. But its decline and disintegration over the past few years leaves a Twitter-shaped hole in the broader social media landscape, and in spite of the emergence of other social media models (the video-centric model of TikTok, the discussion boards of Discord, and so on) there clearly remains a substantial demand for a platform that offers the kind of text-centric global public debate which Twitter enabled during its heyday. Mastodon, Bluesky, and the various Twitter clones that have come (and in some cases already gone) in recent years have not yet managed to fill that space – in part perhaps because they are too difficult for new users to understand; in part because they just feel like more of the same, rather than a genuinely new beginning; in part also because they are still waiting for that breakthrough moment which pushes them into the limelight in the same way that Oprah’s celebrity endorsement in 2009 launched the previously niche Twitter startup into the public consciousness.

For a very long time now, I’ve believed that the expansion and contraction of the social media landscape is cyclical: as previously dominant older platforms decline and die, a period of fragmentation and experimentation follows; perhaps thinking along similar lines, Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth has described the current bewildering array of new social media start-ups as a Cambrian Explosion of platforms. Over time, though, that mix of platforms will consolidate again as some of these startups fall by the wayside and others find long-term success; perhaps Bluesky or Mastodon will be among the survivors and emerge as leading platforms of that next era of social media, or perhaps they will be overtaken by new species of social media that draw on their federated activity protocols, but implement that functionality in new ways that prove more attractive to a larger userbase.

For now, we can only wait and see – and hope that the operators of those new platforms find better ways to protect them from the inevitable attention and influence of bad actors. Or better yet than simply hope: build on the findings from our research to put public pressure on those operators to do better than Jack Dorsey and his colleagues did when they ran Twitter.

GESIS Blog: Mr. Bruns, we would like to thank you for the insights from an insider’s perspective and wish you all the best for your stay in Germany. We are looking forward to your upcoming lecture at our institute.