Controlled chaos? Or is Twitter in meltdown?

The following column was posted in the Wiser! Newsletter on 7th July 2023.

I know, I know. I promised you there would be no more Twitter distractions on Wiser! But this week I couldn’t help myself. Which is odd because Twitter figures less and less in my work these days. I used to be on the platform every day, looking for news and stories and opinions. It was the first place I used to turn too for more insight on anything that caught my attention. But no longer is that the case. To me, Twitter is no longer relevant as a news app.

However, there are several threads (excuse the pun) that make Twitter newsworthy this week.

First, Elon Musk’s odd decision to throttle usage over the weekend. For a platform that earns its money from ads, which means it literally feeds off your continued attention on the platform, it is remarkable that Musk would enforce a restriction on how much anyone could use Twitter. This is even more bizarre given that advertising revenue has halved since Musk took over (to around $2.5 billion) and he needs all they can get!

As with previous major platform changes, Musk made this change before telling the Twitter user base. When he did put his head above the parapet, his reasoning was to blame AI for mass scraping of Twitter tweets. He gave no specifics to this unspecific…