2026/04/22 by Axel Bruns · 2 voices
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Social Media and Politics
paper · doi:10.5204/mcj.3247
openalex publication_date 2026/04/22 · openalex created_date 2026/04/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/31
Introduction Twitter launched on 21 March 2006 to a largely uncaring public. It remained mostly unknown to all but a self-selecting group of technorati for the following years, until it was plucked from obscurity by the endorsement of U.S. television host Oprah Winfrey. Then at the height of her influence, she famously posted her first, all-caps tweet “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.” live from her television show on 17 April 2009, with Twitter CEO Ev Williams watching on. The effect was immediate: account sign-ups to the platform spiked, and the Twitter userbase grew rapidly from then on. Although attracting more than 320 million monthly active users during its heyday (Molina), Twitter was never a mass participation platform comparable to Facebook, Weibo, or Instagram. Instead, what distinguished it from its competition was both the particularly influential clientele of local, domestic, and international actors that it was able to attract (e.g. Ausserhofer & Maireder), and the way in which its flat and open platform affordances and network structure at least appeared to (and in some cases genuinely did) enable direct interaction between these elite accounts and the larger mass of ordinary users. While never consciously designed for this purpose (cf. Burgess & Baym), once it was fully established, Twitter provided direct access to the posts of a collection of celebrities, politicians, journalists, business leaders, experts, activists, government and non-government institutions, and corporations that was often nearly complete in many of the regions in which the platform was being used. This also led to it becoming a platform of critical importance for sharing, discussing, and otherwise engaging with news and current events. The substantial changes to Twitter as a company and platform since its takeover by Elon Musk on 27 October 2022 have meant that that platform has died, however. Even the name Twitter itself no longer exists, following its rebrand as ‘X’. This article explores how these changes have affected opportunities for constructive, prosocial online public debate, and examines the extent to which new social platforms are able to fill the space now vacated by Twitter. News, Public Debate, and Prosocial Activism on Twitter The use of Twitter for engagement with news and current events has perhaps been highlighted most prominently in early scholarly analyses of the platform: such work addressed, for example, the role of Twitter in crisis communication during natural disasters and political events (Hughes & Palen), or more generally described the platform as an ‘ambient news’ network (Hermida). Again, the flat and open structure of the platform – where the vast majority of accounts and their posts were publicly accessible by default; and where users could freely follow and tweet at almost any other account, without a need to be accepted as a follower or ‘friend’ (Gruzd et al.) – played a critical role in facilitating such uses, as did the rapidly growing use of hashtags as a user-generated means of coordinating feeds of posts relating to a given topic. Hashtags proved especially critical, indeed, to the bottom-up surfacing of information without the (initial) involvement of major institutional accounts. They enabled key voices to be “crowdsourced to prominence through the pluralizing practices of retweeting, mentioning, and other addressivity markers” by the platform’s ordinary users, as Meraz & Papacharissi have put it (158). In spite of these important uses, Twitter was always more than ‘only’ a news network, however, as Burgess & Baym have documented. Beyond their uses in breaking news (and sometimes overlapping with such uses), for instance, hashtags have always also been crucial to connecting communities – from small and localised interest and identity groups to major, global, prosocial activism like #metoo and #blacklivesmatter (e.g. Jackson & Foucault Welles). In doing so, well beyond their roles in the context of acute events, they also served a purpose in facilitating the longer-term tracking of issues and events. This is demonstrated for example by the six-year campaign in Australia for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the federal government’s illegal #Robodebt scheme (Dehghan & Bruns). The platform facilitated what Bennett & Segerberg have described as “connective action”, enabling the ad hoc organisation of hashtag followers into crowds with a notable impact on public debate (though not necessarily public policy) related to the issues that such connective action addressed. Through such efforts, as well as more day-to-day thematic attention and networking between accounts focussing on related issues, Twitter also enabled the emergence of a new class of expert voices, community leaders, and issue influencers. This use of social media to build and exert influence was certainly not limited to Twitter alone (Abidin), and of course also produced a substantial amount of ill-informed charlatans opining on topics well outside their area of expertise. But yet again the very public and open nature of communication on Twitter often also served to flush out such misinformation, as genuine experts responded to and debunked misguided views – at least as long as the operators of the Twitter platform also played their part by acting on reports of influence operations and egregious mis- and disinformation sharing. Genuine experts and community leaders found an audience on Twitter, then, especially also because its flat and open structure enabled the rapid horizontal dissemination of their posts not only through hashtagging, but (arguably more importantly) also with the help of retweets (Hemsley). Retweeting distributed other accounts’ tweets to the retweeting user’s network of followers, even if they were not themselves following the retweeted user or any hashtags included in that users’ tweets (cf. Bruns & Moe). This substantially aided the serendipitous discovery of emerging, novel, and unexpected topics and events, and was itself amplified further by the Twitter platform’s identification of current ‘trending topics’, globally or in a user’s geographic region. In a refrain that is recurring throughout Twitter’s history (also cf. Burgess & Baym), Twitter as a platform worked best when its systems responded to the interests and practices of its userbase. Such serendipitous, playful, and social – indeed, joyful – uses of the platform were often overshadowed by the considerable media and scholarly interest in Twitter’s more serious news and business uses. Yet the evidence suggests that social, phatic uses (from simply hanging out online together to mostly good-natured shitposting) accounted for the majority of Twitter activity on any given day (Bruns & Moon). For all the cultural cachet that the hashtag has gained as a media object well beyond Twitter itself, hashtagged tweets were always only a minor subset of all tweets, for instance, and the vast majority of ordinary users did not engage with the platform predominantly for professional purposes. As David Roth put it in one of the many eulogies for the Twitter that was which have been written since the Musk takeover, then, for all the overwrought ways in which Twitter has been described—[Tucker] Carlson called it “the place where our national conversation incubates and develops”…—the comparison that always made the most sense was too small-bore for the big-thinking types. I’ve always thought of Twitter as a house party that I could visit or leave at my leisure. Different things were happening in different rooms, some of them for me and some of them very much not. Over time I learned how to find the scenes and conversations I liked, and came to recognize the people I saw in those rooms as friends. (The owners were of course not around.) This is a fine thing for a website to be, I think. This seems to encapsulate well the general sense of loss that many long-term Twitter users have experienced since the inexorable decline of the platform set in after Elon Musk bought it – yet (like other memories of adolescent house parties) it also creates an image of an antediluvian golden age that likely never existed as such. The Writing on the Wall The sober truth is that Twitter was never well-managed. The owners were indeed never around, or, even if they were, usually failed to show unwanted intruders the door. During its early days, this inattention was perhaps masked by an overall sense of excitement and enthusiasm for this new platform, and by the way management seemed to both take on new ideas (search functions, hashtags, etc.) and open the platform’s technical infrastructure to developers, businesses, and researchers to build third-party tools and extensions and to better understand how people were using the platform (Burgess & Bruns). As Ash notes, even Twitter’s 2013 statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for its public listing on the stock exchange still makes the commitment that the mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways to improve – and not detract from – a free and global conversation. (Twitter, Inc.) This commitment waned considerably as Twitter’s management, in search of a longer-term business plan, began to crack down on third-party uses of its data, and sought to monetise such data for themselves – not least also in response to shareholder pressure to perform financially. By 2015, “no longer is Twitter speaking to barriers of freedom, but rather, they focus on generating revenue. A marked shift in rhetoric is now made visible” in its quarterly earnings reports (Ash), especially as Twitter’s development slowed while the company invested in ill-fated ventures like video pl