The Twitter Story, But Longer

In 2014, TechStuff did The Twitter Story, but a lot has happened in the following 8 years. We look at what has happened to the company, including its current mess involving Elon Musk.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and how the Tech are You? You know, tech Stuff
has a long history with Twitter. Way back when I

(00:25):
was a writer for how Stuff works dot com, I
became one of the first employees to establish a Twitter account,
and I would use that account to share articles I
had written, as well as you know, make goofy jokes
and share photos of pets and tacos and that kind
of thing. And my use of Twitter actually got me
an award at work because I had found a new

(00:47):
form of outreach. I didn't set out to win an award.
This just kind of happened because I was just using Twitter,
and I honestly was really worried because the thing I
was doing on my own for funzies is likely to
become a mandated part of our work, which meant my
co workers who had no interest in creating Twitter accounts
might find that they were obligated to. So whoop. See,

(01:10):
this is why we can't have nice things now. When
we launched the podcast text Stuff, Twitter was front of mind.
We actually did an episode about Twitter on our twelfth episode. Ever,
this was back when Chris Palette was my co host,
and then six years after that, Lauren Vogelbaum and I
would do an episode called The Twitter Story back in

(01:34):
the early Feen, I should add, and this was back
when she was my co host. But a lot has
happened since two thousand fourteen, not the least of which
is the ongoing drama between Elon Musk and Twitter, which
we will get to. I mean, for one thing, now,
I have no co host, so today I thought we'd
do an update on what's been going on now. I'm

(01:55):
also gonna do a rundown of the early history of Twitter,
so that way you don't have to seek out those
older episodes if you don't want to. However, I want
to say I'm not gonna go over everything we covered
in those previous episodes. I'm gonna hit kind of the
highlights at Twitter. But if you want to learn more,
including some of the pivotal moments in history that Twitter

(02:17):
played a part in, I recommend going back through the
archives and checking out those episodes, particularly The Twitter Story,
which published I think maybe February four Okay, once upon
a time, you had a fellow by the name of
Noah Glass who built a tool that would let you
convert a phone message into an MP three file, and

(02:40):
you could host that MP three file on a service
on the Internet. And this was the core focus of
a company that was called Odeo o d e O.
Odio brought on a guy named Evan Williams to become
the CEO. Williams had co founded Blogger, so he already
had a winning record in startups, if by winning record
you mean creating a tool that would later get bought

(03:01):
by Google and being a little snarky. But Blogger is
actually still around today. It's one of the few things
Google purchased that it did not subsequently shut down just
a few years later. In fact, I don't really have
it in this episode, but Google did purchase a Twitter
like service called Jaku and then subsequently shut that down,

(03:22):
so that happens a lot anyway. Evan Williams brought over
biz Stone from Google to join Odio, and another person
who was working at Odeo as a web developer was
named Jack Dorsey. And obviously these folks would become very
important in the history of Twitter. One of the company's

(03:42):
first big projects was to build out a podcasting platform.
So podcasting at this time was still a pretty young
art form, and the leaders at Odeo saw an opportunity
to become kind of the dominant podcasting platform in the space,
to allow people to discover and subscribe to podcast easily,
and they launched their platform, and then shortly after, Apple

(04:05):
launched its own podcast section in iTunes, and that was
pretty much curtains for Odio's product. Apple already had incredible reach,
I bought owners were reliant on iTunes in order to
add new content to their devices, and so incorporating a
podcast subscription feature into iTunes kind of shut the door
down on everybody else at that time. I mean, we

(04:27):
do call them podcasts after all. Odios podcast platform, technically
launched ahead of iTunes, went live earlier in two thousand five.
But even after Odio flipped the switched on, there was
a big problem because no one was using Odio, Not
even Odio employees were using it. They had built a tool,
but they hadn't convinced anyone that the tool was, you know,

(04:49):
worth using. Jack Dorsey meanwhile, was contemplating a different course altogether.
Dorsey thought it might be interesting to create a service
that would let people post status updates in real time,
sort of like a very stripped down social media platform,
one where you could just post your stats update and
push it out to folks in your social circle, like

(05:09):
the people in your contact list. For example. Maybe for
you might be thinking about you want to go bowling,
and you want to see if any of your friends
are down, so you could send out a what would
be more or less a group text message using the service,
saying going bowling, want to join, and then waiting to
see if anyone responds. Now, according to Dorsey, he had
actually been mulling this over for several years already. He

(05:31):
wanted a tool that would let folks update their status
in real time using a mobile device. Now, remember this
was before iPhones and therefore before the smartphone phenomenon, at
least among the mainstream. Back in the early to mid
two thousand's, most devices that would qualify as a smartphone
were in the hands of executives and maybe a few
curious early adopters, and they looked, you know, more like

(05:54):
the old BlackBerry. Phones often had physical keyboards. Dorsey wanted
to create something that would work with simple cell phones
because that's what most people had. Dorsey eventually teamed up
with Noah Glass and they brought in a contract developer
named Florian Webber, and together they fleshed out this idea
and began to build what would become Twitter. You would

(06:15):
have the platform that would support status updates. You could
follow folks that you knew, so you could essentially subscribe
to them and then keep up with what was going
on in their lives. So when they posted an update,
you could get an alert. You can get a text
message telling you about that update that actually has the
update in it. You could still text person to person obviously,

(06:37):
but this would let folks communicate one too many, not
just one to one. So the team presented the idea
to Odio's leadership and and this was in two thousand six,
and originally they were going to call it Twitter with
no vowels so t W T t r UH, and
they got a tentative go ahead from Odeo, which was

(06:58):
mostly in crisis mode over its primary product not going anywhere.
On March twenty one, two thousand six, Jack Dorsey would
send the first message on Twitter, and just like with
the first video of YouTube, the actual historical first is
a bit underwhelming, He wrote, quote, just setting up my
Twitter again t W T t R. Now a quick

(07:21):
reminder for folks who may have forgotten. Way back in
the earliest days of Twitter, there was a one hundred
forty character limit on messages. And you might wonder why. Well,
the whole service was built on top of the SMS
texting service, and SMS could only carry messages of up
to one hundred sixty characters in length. Twitter allowed just

(07:41):
a hundred forty because it would reserve twenty characters for
user handles and that kind of thing. Using SMS was
important for Twitter because all the work building out the
technology to actually make texting possible had already been done.
Twitter didn't have to invent that it existed. Twitter's technology
could be on top of that foundation. Twitter would go

(08:01):
on to build both a web based interface and also
allow users to interact with Twitter purely through texting on
their cell phones. This would also mean that early Twitter users,
depending on how they enabled Twitter and how they used it,
would have to keep in mind that they could get
charged for texting due to Twitter activity. Uh and it's
not so much the case today, but back in the day,

(08:22):
like cell phone companies, carriers would find lots of creative
ways to charge you, including if you used too many
messages in a month. In July of two thousand six,
Twitter again still t w t t R, launched sort of.
It was a pretty small launch and that most of
the users were either Odio people or Silicon Valley folks

(08:46):
like investors and people who worked at other tech companies.
In September of two thousand and six, Evan Williams would
buy back the stake that various investors had in Odio.
So Williams was saying that Odio's podcast platform was a
bust and that very few people, maybe around five thousand,
had even registered with Twitter. So he was saying, rather

(09:08):
than have your investment become a loss, I will buy
back your investment now. Later speculation suggested that Williams could
see where Twitter was going, and so he wanted to
get ahead of it in order to really profit off
of it. Like he would spend the money now to
buy back these investments, but then once Twitter took off,

(09:28):
he would really be making bank. Now. I don't know
about that. It's possible, but then nothing in tech is
a sure bet, and that sounds like a really hefty
gamble to me, but it might have been the case,
and if it was a gamble, it did pay off.
Around this time, Noah Glass got fired from Odio. Now
apparently Glass and Evan Williams had opposing personalities, and Glass

(09:50):
would later say that he had actually been planning to
spend Twitter off from Odio and then lead Twitter himself.
That obviously never happened. Instead, Video changed its name to
Obvious Corporation and it prepped for two thousand seven. That's
when the platform made a big appearance at south By Southwest.

(10:11):
That's obviously this this huge event that happens in Austin, Texas,
and if it revolves around three major topics. There's music,
so all these different bands from around the world come
to Austin and play shows. There's movies, so you've got
lots of studios and independent filmmakers showing films at south

(10:32):
By Southwest. And then there's interactive or technology, and that's
what you know Obvious Court was going to. And so
Twitter made an appearance and it won an award and
got a lot more coverage. So while the service had
been up for a little less than a year, you
could argue that March two thousand seven was the real
starting point for Twitter, because it was at south By

(10:54):
Southwest that the tech world in general really latched onto
it and it began to grow rap and a month later,
Obvious Corporations spun off Twitter as a standalone company. Dorsey
would end up serving as CEO of Twitter and Evan
Williams would be Chairman of the board. Twitter would go
on to raise nearly six million dollars in initial funding

(11:16):
with investors, and for many many years, Twitter, getting a
fresh influx of investor cash would be how the company
would stay in business. It actually became something of a
running joke that Twitter would be a tool that everyone wanted,
everyone used, but it had no real way to make
any money. So the only way it could stay in
business is if it asked investors to pour more cash

(11:39):
into it. Something else that would become a running joke
with Twitter for a few years anyway, involved its web interface,
so this was still kind of coming together in two
thousand seven and two thousand eight. But the web interface
would let you scroll through tweets and post new tweets
without having to use your phone. You could navigate to
the web page into it. You can still do that today.
In fact, a lot of people do how of her.

(12:00):
Twitter was really growing very quickly, and sometimes stuff broke,
particularly during you know, busy moments, like if there was
a big cultural event that a lot of people were
reacting to that could really tax Twitter's servers, and when
that happened, web users would frequently encounter an error page
that had a cartoon whale on it. It was a

(12:20):
cartoon whale being lifted into the air by a bunch
of little birds. It was artwork that was created by
an artist named ye Inglu for a stock art site.
Lou had originally created the image for a birthday card,
and she called the image lifting a dreamer. But on
Twitter this image had a different name. It became known
as the fail Whale, and back in the old days,

(12:42):
he saw it fairly frequently if you were an avid
Twitter user. If you're not familiar with the fail Whale,
chances are your experience with Twitter started after the year
two thousand and thirteen, because that's when Twitter finally discontinued
the use of the image. In October two thousand eight,
Jack Dorsey would stepped down as CEO of Twitter for
the first time, but not the last time. Evan Williams

(13:06):
became the new CEO and Dorsey became the new chairman
of the board, which meant that the two of them
just did the old switchero. Apparently working for Dorsey could
be a bit challenging, according from insider reports on Twitter,
so there appeared to be an impetus for this change.
In January two thousand nine, Twitter would make world headlines

(13:26):
because a tweet actually broke a news story before any
major media outlet could do it, and that news story
was the crash landing of US Airways Flight fifty nine
into the Hudson River. The plane had collided with a
flock of birds shortly after it took off from LaGuardia Airport,
and pilots Jeffrey Skiles and Chesley Sully Sullenberg glided the

(13:48):
plane into the Hudson. All passengers and crew survived. A
few folks received some serious injuries, but other than that, uh,
it was remarkably safe, and the message on Twitter got
boosted and seen before any official news outlets could get
word out, and it became obvious that Twitter could play
a critical role in covering important events in real time,

(14:09):
not just an app that let you say what you
were having for lunch. Okay, we're gonna take a quick
break here. When we come back, we will continue Twitter's history.
We're back. So in two thousand nine, Jack Dorsey co

(14:29):
founded another company, and this company is a payment processing service,
with the big selling point at the time being that
you could get an attachment for a mobile device that
would let you swipe credit cards and process the fees
right there, which drastically reduced the infrastructure you needed in
order to have a point of sale that could accept

(14:51):
credit cards. So this is when suddenly merchants who would
go to like festivals and stuff would be able to
easily accept credit cards because using a mobile device that's
connected to the cellular network, using this add on and
then swiping a card, they could actually process payments without
having to get the old carbon copy stuff out. That

(15:13):
company is of course named Square, and while it's not
directly tied to Twitter, Square would have a huge impact
on Twitter's history. Later on, in October, Evan Williams would
step down as CEO to focus on product strategy, and
former CEO of Twitter, Dick Costello would take over and

(15:34):
remain CEO until now. In Twitter would launch Vine, which
is a short form video app, or was a short
form video app. They'll let users post videos that were
just six seconds long. And you know, their original intent
was just to create a video version of a tweet,

(15:54):
like something that's very short and very timely that you
could then share online. However, people took to Vine in
order to build stories and very short films and making
a really good Vine became a real art form and
and a lot of people use it for storytelling or
more accurately, joke telling. And Vine would stick around for

(16:17):
a few years, but Twitter would ultimately shut it down
in and I'll talk about why that happened and a
little bit. In November, Twitter held its initial public offering
or i p O. Now, in case you're not familiar
with that term, that's when a privately held company transitions
into becoming a publicly traded company with shares trading on

(16:41):
a stock market somewhere. This lets anyone who has the
cash become an investor by buying up a share or
maybe a few shares or maybe a few thousand shares
before the stock market opened. The offer price was to
be around twenty six dollars per share, so part of
the process of the I p O is that a
company has to kind of figure out what they think

(17:04):
a share price is worth. And this is supposed to
be based upon the value of the company, and you're
supposed to take all these different things into account. There's
a very long process for doing it. So in Twitter's case,
they thought this merit's a twenty six dollar price for
a share of stock of Twitter. Instead, due to intense

(17:24):
interest in the market, when sales opened up, those shares
were moving at forty five dollars per share. At the
end of the day, it closed just slightly lower than that,
at forty four dollars ninety cents per share, and still
much higher than twenty six bucks. Right now, if you're curious,
the day I'm recording this episode, Twitter is currently trading

(17:44):
in around thirty three dollars and fifty cents to thirty
three dollars and sixty cents per share, somewhere around in
that range. So still higher than what the opening offer
price was going to be, but lower than what the
actual price of Twitter stock was for that first day
of trading. Not Over time, Twitter's stock price would grow
um not steadily. There were times where it would dip

(18:07):
a bit and then it would grow a bit. It
hit a high, but not an all time high, in
December of two thousand thirteen, when it closed at a
price of seventy three dollars and thirty one cents per share.
Really amazing, Like when you consider that's one month after
it started trading, that's phenomenal. However, in February two thousand

(18:30):
and fourteen, Twitter reported that its growth had slowed, with
an increase of just five additional users. So the way
that these metrics work, it's not just that you have
to keep growing in order to be perceived as valuable.
You need to be growing at an increasingly faster rate

(18:50):
for the market to consider your company as still being valuable.
When your growth begins to slow, investors get nervous because
they're worried that's just a matter of time before that
growth number levels out and then begins to be a
lost number instead of a growth number. So you never
want to see the growth rate decrease. At best, you

(19:11):
want to level it out, but you don't want to
see it go down from one year to the next anyway.
The stock price began to decline starting around early two
thousand fourteen, and by May fourteen, it was down to
thirty dollars fifty cents per share, less than half of
what it had been at its earlier peak. But then

(19:32):
two years later, on May twenty six, two thousand sixteen,
it would be all the way down to fourteen dollars
and three cents per share. Yikes, um, and a lot
of stuff was going on to make this happen. Right,
The stock price was reacting to lots of investor worries.
Whenever Twitter would say that they hadn't met their revenue goals,

(19:55):
or that their growth rate was lower than expected, or
that user engage it wasn't on the incline, then you
would see a loss of investor confidence and ultimately a
drop in share price. Now, over time, that price would recover.
It was in the teams for a really long time,

(20:15):
but eventually it would grow back into the twenty and
thirty dollar range and then higher. So by two thousand eighteen,
the price would still be fluctuating, but generally was on
a path of growth, and by March first, two thousand
twenty one, the price hit its all time high of
seventy seven dollars sixty three cents per share. All right, um,
we're now past the point where the old Twitter Story

(20:38):
podcast left off, because, like I said, we recorded that
in the winter often like the early winter. February I
think is when we recorded it. So let's talk about
stuff that happened after February fourteen. If we go to
the end of that year, December, Twitter released some anti

(20:58):
harassment tools, so it was bowing to pressure to do
something about the intense abuse some users were receiving for
having the audacity to do radical things like being a
woman or you know, having an opinion that was different
from other people. I'm being more than a little snarky here,
but we have to remember, Okay. August of two thousand
fourteen was when we had the beginning of gamer gait,

(21:22):
which was a truly awful campaign in which angry people,
mostly men and mostly straight, began to target mostly women
in the video games industry. Now not exclusively, there were
other people who were targeted to the way this was
framed was that it was a crusade to weed out

(21:43):
corruption and misinformation in the video game industry and video
game journalism, the idea being that video game reviewers were
frequently compensated in some way or had some vested interest
in how games were doing, and that that was guiding
their their what they would write about games. Like in

(22:05):
some cases it was just that someone didn't like a
game that you know, the rabid fan base absolutely loved,
and that that was akin to committing treason, and so
this rabid group of fans would want to punish the
person who wrote something critical about a game they loved.

(22:25):
So again, a lot of the people who are targeted
in gamer Gate were women, and some of those women
were journalists who covered video games. Some of the women
were developers in the space or publishers, and the gamer
Gate jerks would use all sorts of abusive tactics, including
but not limited to, dockx ing and swatting their targets.
So dockx ing is when you reveal a person's personal

(22:47):
information online, so it's someone else like someone else's info,
and you're sharing it online. Swatting is when you use
personal information to call in a police act and on
a target. So you would give your targets home address
and say that there was something really like critically dangerous

(23:09):
going on there in order to get police to send,
you know, people, perhaps even a whole swat team to
go and check in on that target, and it's all
in an effort to harass, terrorize, or otherwise disrupt the
target's life. So this was happening with gamer Gate a lot.
And while the supposed reason for gamer Gate was to

(23:31):
try and uh and hold the video game industry accountable,
what it really was about was these these people who
were who felt ownership over an industry that they did
not own, and having an ax to grind against anyone
who had a different opinion than themselves and using whatever

(23:53):
tactics they could to make that person's life miserable. So, uh,
I know there are people out there still to this
day who will argue that that's not really what Gamergate
was about. Gammer Kate was about the games, and I'm
just here to tell you that's not true. It's it
was never true. There might have been people who were
concerned about the games industry who got lumped into gamer Gate,

(24:15):
but that's not what gamer Gate was about. Gamer Gate
was about organized, intense harassment of people who did not
deserve to have that kind of abuse heaped upon them.
So Twitter, several months after gamer Gate had just got going,
release some tools that were intended to help people who
had become targets of abuse, So this was one small

(24:37):
slice of what was going on in the world at
that time in an effort to try and protect people
who otherwise we're finding themselves on the receiving end of
some truly awful behavior. Twitter would then continue to make
acquisitions and grow. Uh. It bought the live streaming video
service Periscope, which is an interesting story all in its own,

(25:00):
but we're gonna skip over it because that could merit
an entire episode by itself. In the spring of Twitter
also announced it would begin using targeted advertising, so using
data gathered from Twitter to let advertisers target specific audiences
for specific types of ads. This was a critical part
of Twitter's revenue strategy because the company at this time

(25:21):
was still mostly known as that huge tech company that
wasn't really making money through its business, even though it
was a publicly traded company. In fact, Twitter wouldn't even
have its first profitable year until a bit later, until ten,
so this is not we're talking about. It would still
be three years before Twitter would turn a profit. So

(25:42):
back to Twitter's performance was again lackluster in terms of
growth and user engagement, so we saw the stock price
continued to kind of languish and that would keep going
for the next couple of years. That explains how that
stock price went from being in the sixty and seventy
dollar range to drop all the way down like the
fourteen to eighteen dollar range. In the summer of Dick

(26:05):
Costello would step down as CEO and Jack Dorsey would
come back to serve, at least initially as an interim
CEO while the company looked for a permanent replacement. Eventually
that permanent replacement ended up being Jack Dorsey, so he
we just accepted that he was CEO. Twitter share price
actually had a small recovery once that news published that

(26:27):
Dorsey had come back. This idea of a company's founder
having the right uh perspective and right knowledge to lead
the company forward. So in November of the Twitter was
once again rocking the boat. So up to that time,
if you enjoyed someone's tweet, you could favorite it and

(26:50):
that would create a little star connected to that tweet.
But all of that change because favorites would become likes
and stars would become hearts. Suspicions immediately on the lepre
con Lucky, the mascot for Lucky Charms as being behind this.
That's a bad joke. But the fact that this was
even newsworthy seems ridiculous today. But I do remember back

(27:12):
in the day when this happened, people were talking about
it a lot, and yes, some people were upset by it,
which seems silly. However, for Twitter, it seemed to work because,
according to Twitter's metrics, user engagement increased after Twitter rolled
out this change. So maybe that actually encouraged people to

(27:32):
interact more on Twitter. Uh, it might just be one
of those little psychological triggers that gets people interested. It's
kind of weird. In t s, Twitter had a massive
rollout of its recommended tweets offering, which meant by default,
Twitter feeds would no longer be listed in reverse chronological order,

(27:52):
at least not not completely. Instead, you would get tweets
that were held for you. Say that you were looking
at Twitter on Monday and then you don't look at
it again until Thursday. Twitter would actually present to you
some of the things you missed while you were gone,
and not in the order in which they were posted,
so that you know, you would see stuff that presumably

(28:15):
you would have wanted to have seen. Well. Uh. That
would also sometimes include tweets from people you don't follow,
so you might get some tweets from folks that you
know you never followed them, but maybe they kind of
relate to stuff you do follow. Um. Anyway, this meant
that you could no longer just log into Twitter and

(28:37):
read in reverse chronological order all the stuff that the
people you follow had posted, and that upsets some folks
like me because it made it trickier to to actually
follow what was going on, and you might be tempted
to respond to something, not realizing that in fact the
message you're responding to was posted hours or maybe even

(28:57):
days earlier, and you think, oh, this was just posted
because it's high up on my Twitter feed. Now, Twitter
did include away for users to go in and opt
out of the recommended tweets approach and go back to
reverse chronological but Twitter also said hardly anyone did that,
probably because it requires effort, and we know that a

(29:20):
lot of Twitter users were upset at the change, but
even more of them were too lazy to change it back.
And I include myself in that two sixteen wasn't necessarily
a great year for Twitter, though. This was again where
those stock prices were really low and the company would
end up laying off nearly ten percent of its workforce.
Several high ranking Twitter executives also chose to exit stage

(29:43):
left at this point, like people in leadership positions were
jumping ship, and it led to speculation that the company
was in some serious trouble. But Twitter was able to
weather the storm. So even though it looked bad, Twitter
was able to get through it. Okay, we're getting up
to seventeen. Let's take another quick break. We'll be back

(30:04):
and we will continue Twitter's more recent history. Okay, so
now we'll skip over to November two thousand seventeen. Twitter
expanded the character limit from a hundred forty characters to two,
and Twitter would also allow users to display names that

(30:27):
would be as long as fifty characters in length. At
this point, Twitter was no longer beholden to SMS limitations
like that had been the foundation for Twitter in the past.
That was no longer the case, and Twitter was now
using its own internet based distribution system. So at least
that meant that you could have more space, and Twitter

(30:48):
decided to double the amount of space that people would have,
or the number of characters they could use in their
messages for the short term, most tweets would remain around
a hundred forty characters or fewer, with only twelve percent
of messages going beyond a d forty characters at least
as far as h as late two thousand eighteen. According
to tech Crunch, that was the case, but for the

(31:10):
more loquacious among us, the chatty cathy's such as yours truly,
Twitter was generous and gave us the ability to create
an entire thread of tweets all at once and then
post them simultaneously to Twitter. So instead of posting a
message and then following it up a few seconds later

(31:31):
with another one, and then maybe like half a minute later,
another one, you could craft all of them in a
thread and post the entire thread at the same time.
I've used that feature several times to take a more
expanded approach to addressing a topic, and I've read lots
of other really great Twitter threads about all sorts of stuff,
from thoughts about tech to rapidly changing political situations. Now

(31:54):
in the summer of Twitter made a change that affected
some folks way more than others. And only Sometimes Twitter
locks out or suspends an account for some reason, maybe
the person violated Twitter's policies. Maybe Twitter figures out, oh,
this account is a fake account, like there's no one
behind it. It's just it's just taking up a spot.

(32:16):
So for whatever reason, Twitter will lock those out or
suspend them, and until the summer of two thousand eighteen,
if some of those locked out accounts happened to be
following you, they would actually count towards your follower accounts,
so you can see how many people follow anyone on Twitter. However,
Twitter decided to clean house in the summer of eighteen,
and from that point on, any account that had received

(32:39):
a suspension or lockout would no longer show up in
follower counts. So a lot of accounts across Twitter lost
thousands or tens of thousands of followers as a result,
because it turned out a ton of the the quote
unquote people following that account had been locked out or suspended. Now,

(33:00):
one reason for this move is that it was a
fairly common practice for folks to purchase Twitter followers. See,
follower accounts are kind of like a status symbol, and moreover,
they can translate into lucrative deals for people who are
seen as influencers. So if I were trying to make
a living as an influencer. I need brands to see

(33:22):
me as having a ton of followers, because you know,
what good is an influencer if you don't have anyone
to influence. So those follower accounts are kind of like
a resume when you are shopping around with brands to
figure out if you could be an ambassador for that brand.
And so people would buy up Twitter followers in an

(33:42):
attempt to kind of make them seem more relevant and
more influential. But Twitter would often do these big sweeps
to detect accounts that were just junk or spam accounts,
and once identified, those accounts would no longer factor into
follower counts on influencer page, and so it became something
of an embarrassment to see a person's follower account drop drastically,

(34:04):
the implication being that most of the followers were actually
spam or junk. This would not be the last time
we would see activity like this. In fact, recently there's
been a massive uh issue with fluctuations and follower accounts
due to what Twitter calls quote an increase in new
account creation and deactivation end quote. A lot of that

(34:25):
has happened around the Elon Musk situation, which I promise
we will get to. It might be this, this episode
might be a long one, but we will get to
Elon Musk. Anyway, let's get back to our timeline. So
Congress called several tech leaders, including Jack Dorsey from Twitter,
to have here before Congress to talk about the issue

(34:48):
of election meddling in the election. Also, conservative leaders were
accusing Twitter of shadow banning. So that's when a platform
de emphasizes a particular accounts output so that it doesn't
have as great a reach as it's supposed to. So
let's give a hypothetical. Let's say that I have a

(35:08):
hundred thousand followers, but then Twitter has shadow banned me.
My posts might only reach a small percentage of my followers,
maybe even less than five percent of the people following
me would see my message. The other of followers wouldn't
see those posts, even though they were following me. Twitter,
for the record, denied that it had ever used shadow banning,

(35:31):
and those accusing Twitter were primarily conservative politicians who claimed
that platforms like Twitter and Facebook had an inherent bias
against conservatives, something that I feel I need to point
out has been refuted numerous times in two thousand, nineteen,
Twitter revealed that it had investigated issues with fake accounts
linked to foreign agents that were engaged in conversations around

(35:54):
US politics and social movements. Essentially, Twitter acknowledged that there
were missing forformation campaigns that we're playing out over Twitter,
and the accounts were mostly linked to places like Iran
and Russia. Dorsey would again appear before Congress in twenty
at a hearing called Breaking the News, Censorship, Suppression, and

(36:14):
the Election. This time, conservatives went after Twitter even harder,
arguing that there was this bias on Twitter, despite you know,
not actually having evidence to show that there was bias.
Twitter was, however, taking action against accounts that were actively
spreading misinformation, particularly about the coronavirus, because by now we're

(36:35):
into the actual pandemic, and some of the accounts that
were pushing misinformation happened to belong to high profile conservative figures,
including then President Donald Trump. Now even the President wasn't
excused from Twitter's content policies, and so the platform had
labeled some posts containing misinformation and otherwise restricted the spread

(36:58):
of that misinformation, which fueled these accusations of this anti
conservative bias, where it really it was an anti misinformation policy,
not an anti conservative bias. Twitter had also restricted the
spread of tweets from the media outlet The New York Post,
which had published articles about Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden,

(37:20):
and the claims against Hunter Biden had not been verified
by any other trusted media outlet, so Twitter was taken
the stance that since the claims appeared to be unsubstantiated,
they would therefore qualify as misinformation. But those actions were
enough to fuel the conservative claims that Twitter was anti conservative,
which is a narrative that continues to this day. And

(37:40):
then a year later, in one Dorsey once again got
called to testify in front of Congress, virtually at this
point because we're still talking pandemic here. This time the
subject was about the insurrection in the United States on
January six, two thousand twenty one, which included the storming
of the US Capitol Building. Congress wanted to know what role,

(38:02):
if any, social media played in the radicalizing and organizing
of groups that were involved in the violent acts of
that day. We're still learning facts relevant to the questions
asked back then during those those Congressional hearings, and that's
been more than a year since then, and to jump
off on a little bit of a tangent, I think
it's entirely fair to say that social networks facilitate radicalization

(38:25):
and in some cases even promote radicalization. We've talked in
the past about how various recommendation algorithms can reinforce radical
messages and create a situation in which a person is
presented with radical viewpoints repeatedly, thus reinforcing these beliefs. And
this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Of course, I would

(38:47):
never go so far as to say that social platforms
are solely responsible for radicalization. That would be untrue, but
it does seem fair to at least say that social
platforms play a part in this, and depend upon the
recommendation algorithms being used, it could be an important part
of radicalizing and recruitment. Anyway, back to Twitter. In late one,

(39:12):
Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO. The company's chief
technology officer, parag Agreval, replaced Dorsey, and you might wonder, Okay,
so why did Jack Dorsey step down? Now? He said
it was because Twitter was ready to move beyond the
vision of its founders, but he was also still helming
Square he was still acting as CEO of Square, which

(39:34):
was something that was requiring a lot of his time
and focus, and that meant that Twitter would end up
being treated like a redheaded stepchild, as they say, with
Dorsey not devoting at least his full attention to help
grow the company. So people were saying that Dorsey wasn't
giving Twitter the amount of attention needed to make Twitter
a success. Instead, he was dividing his attention between Twitter

(39:58):
and Square, and so do or See ended up stepping
back and saying, all right, I'm gonna just focus on Square. Also,
it's possible that he was tired of being called up
to appear in front of Congress at that point, because
he had had to do it three times in four years,
and that's a lot. And then we get to this
year two and Elon Musk's announcement that he intended to

(40:20):
purchase Twitter. Uh Now, before that even happened, news broke
that Musk had purchased nine point two percent of Twitter's
stock on April fourth, two thousand twenty two. At that time,
that made him the largest single shareholder in Twitter. That
revelation led to Twitter shares jumping in value, and on
Friday April one, Twitter was trading at thirty nine dollars

(40:44):
thirty one since per share, so that's before the announcement.
Then on Monday, April four, when news broke that Elon
Musk had made this huge purchase, the closing price was
up to forty nine dollars nine cents per share, So
I went from thirty nine thirty one to that's a
significant jump. It really shows how people were thinking, if

(41:06):
Musk is buying this much, something must be going on
with Twitter. And immediately there were discussions about whether Musk
was angling to get a seat at the board of
directors or maybe even preparing for an actual takeover of Twitter.
Speculation reigned for more than a week before it became
clear that Musk really was moving to purchase the company,
and it would take another week before that would really

(41:28):
start to settle into something certain and we would learn
of the terms. On April twenty two, uh, we learned
that Musk had agreed to buy out shares of Twitter
at fifty four dollars twenty sins per share, which was
significantly higher than what he would have paid for those shares,
and after some debate at the board level, Twitter had

(41:50):
agreed to that price. It seemed at first that the
company was going to resist Elon Musk's move. It went
so far as to put a poison pill plan in ace.
That's a lot of alliteration, um. A poison bill is
a strategy to try and head off a hostile takeover.
A hostile takeovers when someone convinces shareholders to make really
big changes to a company's ownership by going over the

(42:12):
head of the board of directors. So instead of arranging
things through the board of directors, you go and you
try and buy up enough shares to force a shareholder
vote to potentially change the ownership of the company. That's
that's a hostile takeover. A poison pill is a way
for a company to affect share price or the number
of shares in such a way that it makes a

(42:34):
hostile takeover impractical or impossible. Anyway, all of that ended
up being moot because Twitter's board ultimately agreed to Elon's
terms on April uh. The deal meant that Musk waved
his right to due diligence, which is sort of like
agreeing to buy a house site unseen and just hope
that you didn't overpay for whatever you bought. There's also

(42:55):
a clause in the deal that states if Musk were
two back out of the deal, which could only have
and if there were a situation that fundamentally meant Twitter's
value would be drastically different from what it should be,
then Musk would still be on the hook to pay
a one billion dollar exit price. So, in other words,
first the deal has to be untenable because of some

(43:19):
fundamental reason, then Musk would be allowed to back out,
but you have to pay a billion dollars to do it.
As it turns out, that part is going to be
really important now. Since the day that the news broke
that Musk was gonna try and buy Twitter, hardly a
day has gone by without more Musk and Twitter news.
It's frankly exhausting. Part of the problem is that Musk

(43:42):
initially talked about how his goals involved making Twitter a
platform for free speech, with Musk implying that some of
the criticisms about Twitter's content moderation policies were merited. So again,
this starts to play into that perception that Twitter has
this anti conservative bias or that it made a mistake to,

(44:03):
you know, limit the spread of misinformation about stuff like
COVID and election manipulation and that sort of thing. So
Musk's message seems to indicate that his version of Twitter
would reverse some of these actions, making it a true
free speech platform, which by the way, it can't actually do,

(44:24):
at least not all over the world because there's some
places that have very strict content policies, you know, like India.
So some of the things that people have guessed Musk
might do include some controversial moves, like even reinstating former
President Trump's account. One thing I didn't cover is that
President Trump lost his account in the wake of the

(44:47):
January six insurrection in um he continuously violated Twitter's policies,
and Twitter then banned his account. So there's been some
speculation that Musk would reverse that decision, but obviously we
can't speak to that one way or the other because
it hasn't happened yet. Okay, we're gonna take one last break.

(45:10):
When we come back, I'm gonna talk more about this
Musk Twitter situation. Okay, So, another big thing that Musk
talked about early on when it became known that he
was he was moving to purchase Twitter was his goal

(45:33):
to wipe out bots on Twitter spam bots and junk bots.
He identified that as one of the big problems on Twitter,
one of the problems being this, uh, this, this position
on free speech, like being anti free speech, and and
Elon Musk's eyes. The other one being that there was

(45:54):
there were too many bots on Twitter and need to
be cleaned out. There need to be a verification process
to make sure that whomever holds a Twitter account is
in fact a human being. Now, later on, he began
to use the bots as a reason that he wasn't
so sure that the deal should go through, which again
is confusing because at the very earliest stages he was

(46:14):
saying one of his goals was to clean up Twitter
from bots, like that was one of the reasons he
wanted to purchase it. So it's somewhat confusing that a
bit later he's like, hey, hey, I don't think I
want to buy this anymore. There are bots on it,
and and and meanwhile I'm sitting here saying, you knew
there were bots on it, that was one of the

(46:35):
reasons you said you wanted to buy the thing. Um,
But hey, you know, who am I to judge? I
guess anyway, I found it really frustrating because you know,
it seemed like he was going backward and saying like, oh,
I didn't realize there were bots here. So he began
to demand information on how many bots are actually on Twitter.

(46:57):
Twitter came back and said that, according to their estimates,
fewer than five percent of all monetize herbal accounts on
Twitter or bots. Musk disputed that. He just said that's
not true. He didn't present evidence of that not being true,
but he said that's not true, and he suspected the
number was much higher. Uh, and by much higher, it

(47:18):
went anywhere from to more than nine percent in some accounts,
which more than seems more than a little unrealistic to me,
but whatever. Anyway, Twitter would go on to actually send
raw data to Musk's team. They said, you know, we
told you what our methodology was, we told you what
we found. You said, that's not true. So here's the

(47:41):
raw data. You figure it out, You come up with
your approach to determine how many bots are on the platform,
and you let us know what you found. Now. Most recently,
Musk has indicated that he wants out of this deal
due to the bot issue, which again I'm not really
sure what's that actually going on here, but his legal

(48:02):
team may have to argue that reason in court because
Twitter's board of directors have indicated that they're holding Musk
to his agreement that they will sue him. They will
take him to court over this matter if he tries
to back out of the deal, and if a court
decides that the bought issue is not crucial to Twitter's

(48:23):
value right, that it doesn't meet that bar that must
be met in order for Musk to be able to
back out of the deal, well, then Musk is gonna
have to go through with it. He's gonna have to
bite the bullet and purchase the company for like forty
four billion dollars, which is what he agreed to. The
activity has led to massive speculations about what Musk's motives

(48:47):
have been, and theories have been posted everywhere from like
sub Credits and Twitter to mainstream media. So let's run
down a couple of the big hypotheses of what's quote
unquote really going on here now. One is that Musk
actually wanted to buy Twitter, that that he was sincere
in his desire to purchase the platform, but then a

(49:10):
downturn in the economy made that more expensive than Musk
was comfortable going with the value of Twitter's stock dropped,
and so did Tesla's stock value. Now a lot of
Musk's personal wealth is tied in with Tesla stock. Like
Musk is the world's richest man, but it's not like

(49:33):
he has billions of dollars in a bank vault Allah
Scrooge mc duck. Most of his money is tied up
in stocks, including Tesla stocks. So some have said that
Musk wants out of the deal because his personal wealth
has already taken a heck of a clubbing due to
Tesla's stock performance, because that that stock price of that

(49:54):
company has gone down significantly since the spring. Also, not
all the cash to buy Twitter is actually coming from
Elon Musk himself. In fact, most of it is coming
from other sources. He had to secure a few financial
partners to get funding, so of a lot of this
is him putting up stock as collateral in order to

(50:16):
get the funding necessary to make this purchase. And again,
if the stock price for Tesla is going down, then
it requires more shares of Tesla to meet that collateral,
which means he's putting up even more of his personal
wealth up as a in a way to guarantee alone.

(50:37):
Rich people, by the way, mostly are buying things on credit,
and they're using the wealth they have and things like
stocks as collateral, so they're not they live in a
totally different world that I live in. But anyway, once
things are going boldly in the stock market, that makes
this more uh personally costly for Elon Musk. It means

(50:59):
he has to dedicate more of his personal assets towards
establishing the collateral he needs in order to get the
loans he needs. So it's harder for him to get
the money together to buy Twitter, and that that might
be making must have second thoughts that he wants out
of the deal because he doesn't want to commit that
much of his own personal wealth to the to the endeavor.

(51:24):
But there's another hypothesis as well, and this one says
that Musk never intended to buy Twitter in the first place. Instead,
he just wanted to have a reason to liquefy some
of his stocks in Tesla without triggering a larger negative
reaction to him doing that. And here's the thinking. So
when a leader sells off a big old chunk of

(51:45):
stock in the company that they lead, other investors might
see that as a sign that the leader has lost
confidence in their company. So the investors then may also
move to sell off their shares. That results in a
stock price drop, perhaps even a drastic one. So then
the question is, how can a leader liquefy a significant

(52:06):
amount of stock to the tune of more than eight
billion dollars in the case with Elon Musk and Tesla
without causing that kind of panic among investors. Well, according
to this hypothesis, Musk's approach was to make it appear
as though he were going to purchase Twitter. And obviously,
in order to purchase Twitter, he would have to fund

(52:28):
that purchase. And you know the overall price when you
add up those fifty four dollars twenty since per share
would be around forty four billion dollars. So as part
of that, Musk would need to liquefy some of his
stock in Tesla in order to have cash as part
of his offer to Twitter. So the sell off of
Tesla stock would thus be seen as a business move

(52:51):
for Musk to acquire another company, not that Musk wanted
to sell his shares or had somehow lost confidence in
Tesla itself, Because while he was selling a lot of
stock he still owns, more like he still owns of
all the shares in Tesla. So maybe, say the speculators,

(53:11):
Musk was looking to cash in on eight point four
billion dollars worth of Tesla stock without tanking share prices
of Tesla, and he used Twitter as kind of a
cover story with the intent of never going through with
the deal. But if that is the case, he made
some pretty darned stupid business decisions when he was forging

(53:35):
that deal with Twitter, because backing out is not an
easy thing to do, and if even if he does
manage to back out, he's going to have to pay
a billion dollar fee. So maybe he was willing to
spend a billion in order to cash out eight point
four billion, But if so, this was a dumb way
to do it, because if his lawyers can't convince a

(53:58):
court that sacking out is justified, he's still going to
have to go through with the purchase, or what I
think is more likely is go through a much more
expensive settlement where he'll pay out not the full forty
four billion dollars, but it's going to be more than
the one billion fee he would have incurred if he
could back out. Musk is currently showing a lot of

(54:21):
bravado in the face of threats from Twitter to bring
the case to court. Musk says this is going to
vindicate his claims that Twitter is going to be forced
to reveal actual bot statistics in a courtroom. Like he says,
I asked Twitter to give me real statistics on bots.
Twitter refused. Twitter then says it's going to take me

(54:41):
to court. But in court, it's going to have to
show those bots statistics, so I win. Ha ha ha
ha ha. Now I'm no legal expert. I don't know
if that's going to be part of the case. I
don't know if Twitter can just say, hey, we sent
Musk everything. We sent him the fire hose of data.
He's complaining about nothing, So make him go through through
with the deal and make him buy us, and that

(55:02):
might be what the court decides. So yeah, this isn't over.
I don't know whether Musk will end up owning Twitter
or not at this point. Um, I definitely think it's
going to go to court. I don't think Musk is
gonna win. So either he's going to have to pay
a big settlement to get out of this, or he's

(55:25):
going to have to bite the bullet and purchase Twitter.
I don't see it going another way. Now I could
be wrong. Maybe a court will find that Musk's reasons
for backing out are legitimate and they meet the qualifications
required by the deal, and he'll only owe the one
billion dollars and then that will be that. Um, I
think Twitter is going to take a big hit in

(55:46):
its value if that happens. So we'll have to see
how this plays out. But yeah, that's the update on
Twitter's tumultuous history. A lot has happened in just the
last few months, in fact, that you could argue with
that Twitter's history got way more complicated since April of
this year than in the rest of its history combined.
And I think you'd have a pretty strong argument there.

(56:10):
I'm sure once this comes to some sort of definitive end,
whatever that may be, I will come back and revisit it,
maybe do a much shorter kind of update episode. But
I wanted to do this to talk about it because, um, yeah,
it's it's a weird situation and Twitter has been such
an important component in tech and in journalism and an

(56:33):
activism as well as in you know, not great stuff
like in organized campaigns of harassment and election meddling and
misinformation campaigns like Twitter has been at the center of
all this. I think it would be foolish to say
that Twitter is not important. I think it's not foolish
to say Twitter is in trouble because it hasn't like

(56:57):
it's not growing really and it's not becoming more relevant.
It's not like it's increasing user engagement either. But you
can still see where it plays an important part. The
question is isn't an important enough part for it to
justify its existence? And I just don't know, Like when
when the world eventually boils down to how much money

(57:20):
did you make? It starts getting pretty complicated. Okay, that's
it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you
have anything you would like to send me, well, why
don't you send it on Twitter. I'm just gonna talk
about Twitter on this one. You could do that by
sending a message to tech Stuff HSW on Twitter, and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is

(57:47):
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
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