The great delusion behind Twitter

FOR what feels like ages, we have been told that Twitter is, or needs to be, the world’s town square. That was Dick Costolo’s line in 2013, when he was Twitter’s chief executive officer (“We think of it as the global town square”), and Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders, used it, too, in 2018 (“People use Twitter as a digital public square”).

Now the line comes from the “chief twit”, Elon Musk (“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square”).

This metaphor is wrong on three levels.