Commentary: What the world would lose with the demise of Twitter

International organisations and government agencies have invested significant resources in using Twitter and have come to rely on the platform, says a researcher.

In Twitter's 15 years of existence, the platform has become the predominant communication channel for political and
government leaders, businesses, brands celebrities and news media. (Photo: AFP/File/EMMANUEL DUNAND)

Anjana Susarla

22 Nov 2022 

EAST LANSING, Michigan: What do a cybersecurity researcher building a system to generate alerts for detecting security threats and vulnerabilities, a wildfire watcher who tracks the spread of forest fires, and public health professionals trying to predict enrolment in health insurance exchanges have in common?

They all rely on analysing data from Twitter.

Twitter is a microblogging service, meaning it’s designed for sharing posts of short segments of text and embedded audio and video clips. The ease with which people can share information among millions of others worldwide on Twitter has made it very popular for real-time conversations.

Whether it is people tweeting about their favorite sports teams, or organisations and public figures using Twitter to reach a mass audience, Twitter has been part of the collective record for more than a decade.

The Twitter archives allow for instant and complete access to every public tweet, which has positioned Twitter both as an archive of collective human behaviour and as a credentialing and fact-checking service on a global scale. These functions are very valuable for academics, policymakers and anyone using aggregate data to obtain insights into human behaviour.

The proliferation of scams and brand impersonators, the hemorrhaging of advertisers, and disarray within the company call the future of the platform into question. If Twitter were to go under, the loss would reverberate around the world.

ANALYSING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

With its massive trove of tweets, Twitter has provided new ways to quantify public discourse and new tools to map aggregate perceptions, and offers a window into large-scale human behaviour. Such digital traces or records of human activity allow researchers in fields ranging from social sciences to healthcare to analyse a variety of phenomena.

From open source intelligence to citizen science, Twitter has not only been a digital public square, but has also allowed researchers to infer attitudes that are difficult to detect through methods from traditional field research.

For example, people’s willingness to pay for policies and services that address climate change has traditionally been measured through surveys of subjective well-being. Twitter sentiment data gives researchers and policymakers another tool for assessing these attitudes in order to take more meaningful action on climate change.

Researchers in public health have found an association between tweeting about HIV and incidence of HIV, and have been able to measure sentiment at the neighbourhood level to assess the overall health of the people in those neighbourhoods.

PLACE AND TIME

Geotagged data from Twitter helps in a variety of fields such as urban land use and disaster resilience. Being able to identify the locations for a set of tweets allows researchers to correlate information in the tweets with times and places – for example, correlating tweets and ZIP codes to identify hot spots of vaccine hesitancy.

Twitter has been invaluable in the field of open source intelligence (OSINT), particularly for tracking down war crimes. OSINT uses crowdsourcing to identify the locations of photos and videos. In Ukraine, human rights investigators have focused on using Twitter and TikTok to search for evidence of abuses.

Open source intelligence has also been helpful for cutting through the fog of war. For example, OSINT analysts were quick to provide evidence that the missile that exploded in Przewodow, Poland near the Ukrainian border on Nov 15 was likely an S-300 antiaircraft missile and unlikely a ballistic or cruise missile fired by Russia.

CREDENTIALLING AND VERIFICATION

Although misinformation has been disseminated far and wide on Twitter, the platform also serves a role as a global verification mechanism.

First, vast numbers of people use Twitter and other social media platforms. With crowdsourcing writ large, social media assumes the role of an authoritative information provider, reducing some of the uncertainty people face in searching for new information.

The platforms perform a credentialling role that some scholars refer to as “public relevance algorithms”, in that they have replaced dedicated business or technical expertise in identifying what people need to know.

Another way has been official credentialling. Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter’s verification method provided public figures with a blue check mark on their profiles, which served as a shortcut in establishing whether a source of a tweet was who the person claimed to be.

While problems such as fake news, misinformation and hate speech exist, the credentialling ability coupled with the vast number of people who use the platform in real time made Twitter a provider of credible information and a fact-checker.

DIGITAL PUBLIC SQUARE

Twitter’s dual role in fostering real-time communication and acting as an arbitrator of authoritative information is of crucial interest to academics, journalists and government agencies. During the pandemic, for example, many public health agencies turned to Twitter to promote behaviour that mitigates the risk of infection.

During disasters and emergencies, Twitter has been a great venue for crowdsourced eyewitness data. During Hurricane Harvey, for example, researchers found that that users responded and interacted the most with tweets from verified Twitter accounts, and especially from government organisations.

Official Twitter accounts helped in the rapid dissemination of information during a water contamination crisis in West Virginia. Twitter data has also helped in hurricane evacuations.

Twitter has also been an important way for people with disabilities to participate in public discourse.

Twitter’s real value has been in enabling people to connect with each other in real time and as an archive of collective behaviour. Recognising this, international organisations, government agencies and local governments have invested significant resources in using Twitter and have come to rely on the platform.

US Senator Edward Markey has described Twitter as “essential” to American society. If Twitter were to collapse, there’s no clear replacement in sight.

Anjana Susarla is Professor of Information Systems at Michigan State University. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.

[So 15 years ago, there was no Twitter. Now, it is essential and critical? Perhaps the replacement for Twitter (I'm assuming Elon will run Twitter into the ground), should perhaps have two or even three tiers of users. Anyone can be a User. You can sign up, get an account and follow any account you want to or care to. No charge. A Verified OIfficial User will be a government agency (like the CDC or FEMA). The new service might apply for govt funding as it provides a channel for govt agencies to reach out in times of crises. But even if they do get govt funding, it would be quite insignificant. Then there are popular users (like for example, Stephen King). Once they have more than X number of followers, they get a "verified" mark. And they may even get paid to be on the new service (because they attract other users).]