What Is Twitter’s Legacy, 20 Years Later?

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Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the first tweet sent by one of its founders, Jack Dorsey. The post which read, just setting up my Twitter, is a pretty good example of how far the platform has come. By July 2006, Twitter was available to the public and at the outset, Twitter was about these little status updates, a lot like the old AOL instant message or away messages. People posted ambiantly about what they were doing and this was all pre-smartphone. It was this silly, low stakes, localized way to communicate. But like a lot of technologies, it took off, became something almost totally unrecognizable. My own relationship with Twitter, like a lot of journalists, was always really tortured. In its early days, the platform was this way that young writers, reporters, they all got noticed and to this day, I argue that I owe certain parts of my early career to early Twitter. And yet I've spent the last 15 years covering its noxious effect on women, people of color, and bystanders who've had to endure intense trolling. The effects on our politics and our culture. Twitter's founders and leaders espoused this free speech maximalist approach which didn't just allow for abuse and hate speech, it helped build a platform that optimized it. Now you cannot tell the story of the last two decades without Twitter. The rise of Donald Trump, the mainstreaming of this trolly message board culture, attention hijacking, the real time radicalization of politicians and tech elites, and of course Elon Musk, the centabillionaire power user who bought the site in 2022, fired the bulk of its staff and has since turned it into his own political weapon. Twitter, now ex, is quite different. Its worst qualities are on full display now, not as bugs of the platform, but as features. And in some spheres, especially Silicon Valley and the AI conversation, it still manages to have an outsized influence on broader discourse. For whatever reason, the platform seems unkillable. And so what is Twitter's legacy? Why did things turn out this way? How did we get here? To try to get to the bottom of this, I asked Jason Goldman to join me. Jason is one of Twitter's earliest employees, joining the company from Google where he worked on Blogger in 2007 and rose to the VP of Product at Twitter. Goldman was influential in shaping parts of the platform, including its controversial content moderation policies. He was in the room for most of the platform's early successes and its failures. And he's also somebody who has had to watch the way that the platform he once stewarded has warped in weird in society from the outside. He was fired from Twitter in 2010 and he later went on to become the White House's first chief digital officer under Barack Obama. So together we traced the history of Twitter, from its hackathon foundings to Musk's takeover. What made Twitter special, its original sin, Goldman and the Founders' biggest and most costly mistakes, and why the platform, 20 years later, is still alive. He joins me now. But first, a quick break. Jason, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. I'm thrilled you're here. 20 years of Twitter, as we were recording this a couple days ago, was the anniversary of the first tweet. You were there at Twitter about as close to the beginning as one can be. And so I want to start with something I think a lot of people here probably just don't know, which is that Twitter was before Twitter, a podcasting company podcasting idea. Yes. Yes. A platform. Tell me about the early days. What is ODO? How did it become Twitter? Taking back? Yeah. So I think, you know, from my perspective, and this is, you know, influenced obviously by my own history, I think you have to go back to the Web 1.0 days of blogging, which everyone loves to talk about. And so I worked on a product called Blogger that was acquired by Google in 2002, end of 2002, be in 2003. There were six of us, three of us were named Jason. And all six of us went to go work at Google in 2003. Ev Williams was the CEO of Blogger. And one of the first people we hired at Google was Biz Stone. So two out of the three co-founders of Twitter come from Blogger. And one of the things that we worked on while we were at Google was this product called Audio Blogger, which was a partnership between us and this guy, Noah Glass, who ran this third party service for posting audio snippets to the Web. And then Noah, Biz, and Ev went off to do ODO. They were interested in this idea of, oh, there's something here that's interesting about posting audio to the Web. Let's make a podcasting platform. Let's make the YouTube of podcasts in 2006. I was not very interested in podcasts. I thought podcasts seemed not like a really cool idea. And so I stayed at Google while they were working on ODO. And ODO kind of had an interesting notion of what to do, but it was just way too early for podcasts. ODO kind of went sideways. And they had this idea of doing this hackathon where a bunch of different people at the company would break into teams and come up with different ideas for things that they could try, most of which were in the kind of the social space. And then Jack, who was an engineer on ODO, and Noah, and Biz, and Crystal were sort of the four people who worked on the team for what became Twitter. And it was an instant success internally. It was something like in from the March 2006, it was clear there was a lot of interest in it. And yeah, it was something that there was clearly legs from from the very beginning. You're working on Blogger. Obviously, I mean, if we think about it now, like such a fundamental piece of media technology, I mean, we still use the we still use the name. What makes you jump over in that really, you know, exciting energizing moment for Blogger? There's there's two things. Like one was I'd been at Blogger for almost four years. And so I'd seen I'd been able to do kind of a lot of different things there. I had sort of hit the I'd hit the bulwarks of the larger Google organization pretty hard. And Blogger was just never a good cultural fit with the rest of Google proper. And then two in 2004 to 2006, at least, the founders and the executive team there, at least the founders and like sort of the executive team of the product management side and the engineering side really did not get what blogging was. Like all the things you're saying about it being like the heyday of blogging being cool, they did not care about those things at all. And like fundamentally, like we would have conversations with like, you know, Larry and Sergey and, and, and, you know, the rest of sort of the executive team there and about like, hey, like, you know, we've got more page use than the New York Times. Like we're a huge site on the internet. And they're like, yeah, but like the New York Times is where you go to get to the news. Like when are you going to have something that's like authoritative that people can trust? Which is not an unreasonable question, but it's sort of it's sort of like misapprehends like what the point of all of this was. The cultural influence of blogging was not something that was well embraced by the company that we were working for. And that was like ultimately kind of felt like annoying after a while. And so you're feeling this, you are talking, I assume to Evan. Evan Biz, yeah. Is that the thing that drives you over or is it more the broader umbrella of these guys are smart. They're trying to build this, you know, a bunch of different things. Is it Twitter that attracts you or is it? It's Twitter. It's Twitter for sure. You know, Twitter, the first tweets are from March of 2006. My account starts in May of 2006. I'm on a trip with Ev and he's like, oh, you should check out this thing. I signed up over SMS, never see the website. Ev actually creates my username and we had three Jason's at the company and blogger. So I was always called Goldman, which is why my username is Goldman as opposed to I could have had Jason as just like Ev created it for me. I had this camping trip with Biz and Ev on that summer. I was like, how do I work on this? I want to work on this thing. And they're like, well, like, you know, we don't really know what it means to work on this because like we're doing this other company and it's not really working. This is a side project of that. And we've got like, you know, if there's a product manager we already have there, I was like, all right, well, I'm going to quit my job at Google. I'll travel for a couple of months. And hopefully by the time I'm done doing that, you'll have cleaned all this up. And during that sort of summer fall of 2006, Ev buys back Odeo from the investors and it creates obvious the obvious corporation of which Twitter was meant to be one of many products that would be worked on. And I'm hired as the director of product strategy for obvious. Okay. What was the thing on the trip that caused the spark for you? What was the like, you have to drill down. What was the, what was the thing about that's the service at that time that did that? There were six of us. We went to Vegas and we all had like sort of slightly different interests in Vegas. My interest in Vegas has always been very middle-aged man. I like to have a nice dinner and then go play some poker and go to bed at a reasonable hour, even when I was in my thirties. And the ability to use Twitter to like just see what your friends were doing. Like I would just be like, oh, I'm going to play poker for a little bit. And it wasn't like a text update to the group thread. And I would just be able to get these like sort of ambient awareness of what my other friends were doing. It's like, oh, someone's going out to the pool. And there's like six of us. It was like, it felt like a, I think for people who like, like to have a little bit of social distance and don't feel an obligation to kind of like have to respond right away to, okay, I'm coming to the pool too. It was just like, oh, I know what people are doing. I don't need to respond right away. Everyone else knows where I am. We can coordinate and like things will emerge from this. It felt like a new way of being with your friends, both online and offline. That was simply not possible before that. There's some big moments in the early years. You guys win, I think best startup at South by Southwest. Best blog? Is that? Is that a really weird historical fact? Was that we go to South by Southwest in 2007, which is like widely pointed to as like Twitter's like coming out party. We weren't even on a panel. Like we weren't even like, you know, Eves doing or Jack is doing like a key note to explain what Twitter is. Like we weren't famous enough yet for that. We were in the hallway outside in the conference center and set up a monitor, set up a screen where you could see all the tweets that were from people at South by Southwest, but the monitor of being able to see like, oh, there's all these tweets and you could post and you'll see your tweet and you'll be able to see like other people's tweets of what they're doing created as, as Biz would describe this opportunity for emergent behavior, where you'd be at a bar and all of a sudden you'd see a tweet from someone's like, oh, like, you know, actually there's, you know, something cool happening at this bar, like six doors down and you'd watch everyone walk out the door of that bar and move to the bar six doors down. What were some of those emergent behaviors to quote, you know, to quote Biz, like that, that came out of it where you guys were like, whoa, this is, this is even more than the thing that we designed it for. Yeah, there's a, there's a couple of different things. Like, I mean, of course, the important context for 2008, 2009 is that the service took off and like was starting to, you know, was hockey sticking. It wasn't consistent. Like people think like, oh, it was just like, it looked like the usage chart for Anthropic or something like that. Like, like that is not true. Like there were many periods in time where growth flattened out until some like new cohort got it. It was not consistent growth. So there's like, one of the questions I always get asked is like, when did you know it was working? And I worked there until 2010 and through 2010, we consistently thought this could go away at any time. Like at any time, people could just be tired of this and this could just completely die. That's one piece of context. The other is that the service just fundamentally didn't work. Again, remembering the area that we were in, there's two major revolutions, paradigm shifts that happened in this period of time in the late 2000s. One is the introduction of the iPhone, which is tremendously well timed for Twitter and felt like a big breakthrough. The other one is the cloud computing revolution, which we were not well timed for. We were too early for that. So it just, it simply fell over a bunch of a bunch during 2008. Yeah. And that's, that's important because as this thing is having this increased cultural resonance and also developing this reputation for really being good when things are happening, like during live moments, right? Like you want to be a spectator. Steve Jobs, Keynotes, Super Bowls, like those were things early on we saw. It's like, oh, like people really like using it during these live events and it would fall over. Right. And you'd get the canonical, the fail whale, which became its own thing. This, this. It failed so much, the failure became a mascot of the product, which is, I think in miniature, like sort of a pretty good, like is a pretty good shorthand for Twitter, which is like, it is a company and a product that has failed so much that its failure is one of its most iconic mascots and images. And yet it still existed. That's my context setting for 2008, 2009. You asked about like what were like the breakout moments for me, the ones that felt like most validating were the ones that I cared about personally. So it would be things like my, my background's in astronomy. And so like NASA being an early adapter of Twitter was really meaningful because they both thought it was cool and wanted to use it to update about their missions and came up with this genius invention, which was to tweet in the first person from the perspective of the probe going to Mars. And so the probe going to Mars would tweet like, you know, I'm on my way. Like, you know, my shoots are deployed. Like it felt like a live event that you were very personally connected to. And as a, as a space nerd, it felt like the best possible use case. So that, that to me is always kind of number one on the song sheet for me. I felt that was super meaningful. Other ones include certainly the 2008 election where politics, it became clear, was going to be a dominant use case of the product. It was people like talking about news. The Obama campaign was using it to do engagement online in 2007, 2008. And we built a whole election site. And then in 2009, after Obama was elected, we got called by the state department because this is, you know, timely, like we are being told that Twitter is of use in Iran during these pro-democracy protests that are happening. And we have to stay up and not take downtime in order to help support the protesters. This turns out both, I think later, not to be particularly true. Like it seems like maybe Twitter wasn't that important, but and I think and at the time we internally did not want to make a big deal or want to claim a lot of responsibility for pro-democracy movements around the world because we didn't feel we understood those properly. But it became part of the media narrative about Twitter. Was it like a just complete like, oh, oh, shit moment. Yes. When you get that, like we are in over our heads all of a sudden. We're in over our heads. There's no adult in the room who's like an extra like in a, in a contemporary company, you would at least have on the board, like someone who like came from a government background. Both Biz and I had a very strong read on that situation, which was the story is going to be that we're being asked to like save Iran for democracy. And we need to resist that narrative as much as possible, both because we like the Obama administration, but we do not want to be an extension of the United States government like one, we're a private company. And two, we do not understand the particulars on the ground in Iran, such that we can say whether or not what we're doing is helping or hurting or anything else. Like all we know is that this is a complex volatile situation in which we are not experts. And, and like I take a lot of pride in that because I know for sure that it is not retroactively imposing a narrative. We have a lot of documents that we both published publicly, as well as like emails that we had internally. I credit Biz a lot with a the desire to push back on this. What you see a lot in tech right now, which is like any bro has a Twitter account and like 100,000 followers thinks that he's an expert in international energy economics or, you know, like nuclear weapons or, you know, like everyone's an expert in all of this shit. We did not pretend to put ourselves out there as experts on the geopolitics of West Asia. Is this like, is this the moment where there's this kind of a free speech maximalist ethos that like starts to develop inside, right? Which is this, this like, hey, as we start to get more important, we cannot, you know, make these, these big sort of hard lean on the editorial controls. And, and that ends up being its own issue that Twitter has to deal with. 100%. But is that sort of the genesis of it? I think it predates that. I think it becomes tested in that moment, but the free speech ethos for Twitter is a blogger artifact, 100%. I could speak pretty definitively about this because I was in charge of content policy for blogger and blogger, we had a lot of arguments internally that went up to the executive team about wanting to maintain separate content policies for our blogger separate from what would be, what were being applied to in particular AdWords advertisers. And we fought very hard against that and ultimately won that argument and preserved a much more permissive view of what should be allowed, which is essentially like, unless it's illegal, we should be very skeptical about taking it down. So then when I got to, when I got to Twitter, before it was even Twitter, I wrote the first content policy for Twitter. They had previously were using in 2006 flickers content policy and flickers content policy was very granola. And I was like, all right, we'll have a few more things about that. And we had some early tests of the content policy and Twitter in 2007, 2008, where people were being harassed on Twitter. And there was a lot of like, you know, there was, there was like cases of like, you know, someone being called names and someone being kind of stalked across Twitter of saying, like, oh, you know, I know what you did with my, you know, my ex or something like that. And we took a very hands-off approach to that. I think we can call that a mistake. I think I made a mistake on that. Looking back, we should have taken a more aggressive stance. I think the thing that we did not recognize until much, much later on Twitter was that Twitter was fundamentally a different product because of the follow graph and the notifications about mentions. Once those became built into the product, it became much easier to engage in types of abuse vectors and harassment that was not possible on blogger because on blogger, you had your own little protected blog. You could just ban people from the comments or whatever. Whereas on Twitter, someone could show up in your mentions tab and actually be talking all kinds of terrible stuff to you. And even if you blocked them, you knew other people were seeing it. So we applied this free speech maximalist idea from blogger and kept it for quite a long time at Twitter. I think mistakenly, I think that was a mistake that I had a pretty instrumental role in playing, but it was because we did not, we don't recognize that these new kind of vectors were possible. I've done a lot of reporting around Twitter and online harassment and things like that, especially early on in those days. It was real. There were people who suffered very real consequences. 100% Due to this non-understanding, like without taking away anything from the seriousness of that or absolving anyone in this thing. It is again, speaking to this era of whatever we'll call it, you know, like of web two, where it's like building the plane as there, as everyone's flying it. Listen to you say that it's like you guys didn't seem to really understand some of these emergence behaviors of the platform because you didn't know it until you saw them. Yeah. I mean, and like to put a underlying on that point, one of the primary vectors for abuse and harassment became at notifications, right? Like was like you could show up in someone's notifications and, you know, be talking really heinous stuff to them. The entire at mentions protocol was user created, right? That was that was something that users just started doing. It wasn't a feature that we built. We later then beat built features to like, you know, kind of pave the path around that thing that people had started doing. But it was something that just emerged from how people were using the product. So it's not even the case that we built like, oh, we kind of this idea for how how at notification should work and how a notification staff should work. And we didn't kind of do the due diligence to think through the abuse factors. It's like people just started doing this behavior and we kind of put up a scaffolding around it and then realize, oh, wait, there's all this other stuff going on around the the boundaries of that. And this for people who don't or aren't intimately familiar with the history of Twitter or weren't there around the early days. This is a yet another thing that makes Twitter so much different. I think then almost any other platform that exists there, which is that so many of these now canonical features were just built by users like the hashtag. What I think is so interesting, and this has always been very interesting to me about Twitter as a product is. You get this like the these app mentions these replies, you know, the ability to just sort of jump into somebody's network and like grab their attention. And that becomes this thing that, you know, is a source of like serious pain and trauma for a lot of people or this way of like instilling a different kind of brigading behavior on the internet that becomes very foundational to how we do this thing at the same time. It is very much the thing that myself and other people on the service found as like, oh, this is why this thing is revolutionary. Like I can jump into this other journalist mentions, celebrities who are coming on the platform like Ashton Kutcher is this big superpower user. And like Joe Schmo sitting at work can like at this celebrity and like, boom, they just like reply and like you're now texting with a movie star. That's the thing to me that I find so fascinating about the platform is like so much of what makes this thing so useful, so great, so able to drive culture to actually have utility for folks in breaking news situations or just like whatever big cultural moments is exactly the thing that makes it so dangerous and instills these these terrible behaviors. A hundred percent. Like I think you're completely right that this flattening of status across the graph is like this novel feature of the product where it's like, you know, someone who has like 500 likes on their tweet feels like as significant in the network as the biggest celebrity in the world. If like that biggest celebrity, you know, they have equal chance of having place in the firmament. It's the beginnings of what we see dominating the media environment right now, which is this, you know, the niche of vacation of all media where like if you're famous to like 500 people, you're famous like that, that you are a dominant influencer news source for those 500 people and that you are more meaningful to those 500 people than, you know, Ryan Gosling or whatever. That all started, I think with Twitter. And the point about why I think we were blind to the abuse and harassment stuff in those early days is both because we adopted a bad content model from blogger without realizing that the product had changed fundamentally the types of abuse and harassment that could be implemented. But I think, too, it's the fun. One of the fundamental blind spots of technologists and people building services is that you're up against such odds from so many people who don't believe that the thing that you're doing is worth a damn and are just like, why would anyone spend any of their time doing this? Like it's what we heard when we were doing blogger. It's what we heard we're doing Twitter. You know, it's like, this is just where you go to like tell people that you're eating a taco. Like how is that worth anything? And we're like, no, you don't understand. Like this is what's going to, you know, connect the human hive mind and like bring us to like a higher level of consciousness. Like that was like, you know, a true belief. And when you're that zealous about the mission that you're on, which you almost need to be and a startup to survive, that zealotry blinds you completely to the downside risks that you're producing. That is a dominant idea that you see, particularly in this era of the internet, like the 2000 to 2015 era of the internet. Any use of our product is intrinsically good. More of our product in the world is intrinsically good for humanity. We are good people and therefore we just need to get this product in the hands of more people. And if there are downside risks, if there are things that are happening that we don't like, those are bugs and we can fix those bugs, but that's not like the intended use. And so we shouldn't judge the platform based on that. Whereas what I now believe is that those downside risks, those bad things that happen, aren't bugs. Those are just use cases that you enabled that you may not like. Like all of those things are equally weighted use cases and things that your product enabled and you need to grapple with that fact. Harassment of people in 2008, Gamergate. Like those are all things that were enabled because of the system that you built and the choices that you made. Is there an original sin, so to speak, or, you know, a body of decisions that you're making sort of blind to these things as you're building the plane as you fly it? Or do you think that there is like one thing where it's like, if we could have gone back and nipped that thing in the bud. I think we dramatically understaffed the trust and safety team from an early and would routinely poach their engineers because we needed them to keep the service running. You know, it was like, again, the service was not working. It was simply being crushed under its own weight. So like in a choice between like, is this service going to stand up or are we going to have more people to build the internal tools that the trust and safety team needs to prevent abuse? We chose the former 100% of the time and that completely kneecapped like that team's ability to enforce rules or to make good policy. That so that's definitely one choice. I do think kind of fast forwarding to where we are right now. And you sort of already alluded to this, which is like, why are these choices up to these companies 100% of the time? Like why are these choices vested? Why is there no devolvement of authority from beyond the company's walls? Now, that doesn't mean the government. That doesn't mean I want to create like a ministry of content moderation somewhere, but it does mean that there should be some checks on how the job is being done by these companies, by someone outside the companies themselves. There should be some system, even if it's just a scoreboard that says, Hey, we're seeing all the data in real time. We're making assessments of where harm exists. Here's our scoreboard of harm. Like here's like our doomsday clock. We think it's like two minutes to midnight in terms of, you know, CSAM or, you know, user, user abuse on your platform. And it's moved from two minutes to, you know, 90 seconds in the last six months. Like do with that, would you will? But like, you know, we're going to keep every month, we're going to publish an update about how we think you're doing. And I think just simply having like that sort of transparency would be helpful. Well, super candidly, it's the thing that was so frustrating to me as a reporter because like during this time, I don't remember exactly when it was. It was around Gamergate. You'd see these high profile cases of harassment, you know, and it would trickle. It sometimes would just be regular normal women who were just getting, you know, heaps and heaps of these like, you know, threats or, you know, yeah, death threats. Yeah, or things like that, that maybe believed in the world. And you'd get these, what would happen is they would report them to Twitter. And then it would be sort of like, we've handled your claim and we don't see any problem. Like, you know, clearly there was no human in the loop. It was just happening. So it became this thing that myself and, you know, probably, I don't know, 20, 30 other journalists ended up doing where it was like, we were acting as sort of a trusted safety team, you know, like an escalator person basically to like flag it to PR and be like, Hey, so like, we're going to enforce the rules here. And that's the thing is like, you know, the media in this moment of, let's say, like 2015, 2016, 2017 became like this, you know, de facto layer in there of like accountability. But there was at the same time, I think it's been like retrofitted into this idea of like, Oh, the acting, you're trying to act as like a sensor, right? You're trying to act as a thing. And it's like, no, no, no, this is what's like very basic journalism stuff, which was like, you guys have a slate of rules that are changing all the time. Someone is coming and saying the rules have been violated. And as, you know, as a reporter, you're like, well, is the company going to enforce these rules or have the rules changed again? Here we go. And then you'd say, Oh, no, like, you know, such and such user gets banned because reporter at X brought it up or whatever. And it sort of creates this condition that then evolves throughout the like the first Trump presidency. And, and, you know, you have up even to now, which is like, Oh, there's this sensorious media that's just trying to get people banned from the platform. This is a very load bearing argument in the whole reason why Elon Musk decides to come in and want to purchase the platform to quote unquote, restore free speech, you know, to the people. It is part of this like this frustration, I think it speaks to the idea of like not having any way to have accountability for these platforms enforcing their own rules is the thing. Like that's like if Twitter had said, as they do now under Elon Musk, we're an open sewer. It doesn't matter. It doesn't work. Chan, there's no rules. There's no rules. Wild West, there wouldn't be reporters lining up saying like, well, what's going on here? Because it's like, yeah, no, I don't want to be on this website that is not, you know, there's no safety net for it. And so I think that that is, that's like a really fundamental point that undergirds all of this. You exited the company in 2010. And I was fired. But yeah, fired. Okay. Why were you fired? Oh, because I support like, you know, like Jack was fired in 2008, which is something I supported as a board member. Jack comes back, sort of precluded my ability to be employed there any longer. Not like as like, you know, retribution, but just it was like pretty clear that like I wasn't going to support Jack as a leader at the company. And this is an important part of all this too. At this time, it is a relatively chaotic managerial. Like there's just a lot of like shuffling around. Oh yeah. And the drama of Twitter, like our books written about it. What did you think in that time was was ahead for the company? The big debate was like the sort of debate over the business model for Twitter. What was the team that we needed and what was the path that we should pursue for a business model for Twitter? And Eve had a lot of me as well. We had a lot of hesitancy about the ads only approach to the business model for Twitter because we had worked at Google and we're not super wild about the user experience of content targeted ads and advertising and social media. It was like, you know, all this stuff about like, you know, the surveillance, you know, surveillance capitalism and, you know, you are the product. Like all of that stuff is true. Like it's just true. Like, you know, we haven't come up with a better business model to replace it. It turns out that business model is both high margin and high volume. They get remains the dominant way to monetize content on the internet, whether video, text or anything else. But it seemed to be having a bad effect. And that was before we fast forward 10 years and we kind of see some of the negative consequences that that's had for journalism. That's had for the type, you know, for audience capture, all these other effects. So the fundamental tension was how do we convert this company in 2010 from a cultural success to a capital success? And I think the fundamental mistake that we made in that time, that I guess you go back to like sort of like the one mistake we made that I wish we could undo the biggest mistake that we made was consistently comparing ourselves to Facebook on business terms. Like when we were doing the run up to the IPO, it was always like, you know, and even before the IPO, when I was there, like, it was always like, this is going to this is bigger than Facebook. And that is just simply not true. Facebook has better data about its users who are authenticated to be real users. They have more information. They do better surveillance across a suite of apps. They have a better ability to target them. They target on way better variables. Their ads product is just simply better than any that Twitter was going to be able to build. And as a result, Twitter's multiple was never actually going to compare favorably. But its IPO story was that it was going to compare favorably. So that was a big problem. That that is what created the context for Elon to buy the company, because like all of the early investors were able to, you know, were able to get out of Twitter at the IPO time or sometime in the intervening years based on this idea that like, oh, the the multiple curve is going to be hit for Twitter's business and it's going to exceed Facebook's. The street eventually realizes that's not true. The stock is under constant activist pressure from that time on to do something else. That puts a lot of pressure on, you know, Jack as the CEO, which he doesn't enjoy. And that creates the condition for the company to be transacted to Elon. So if I had to go back to one mistake, it's that whole run up to the IPO and the way that the company is positioned as a business. That was the mistake. There's this really important thing that happens in the 2010s after you leave, which is that this guy, Donald Trump is like somehow this really good power user of Twitter. He's like talking about Diet Coke and people are like, oh, this is funny. And he hosts this reality show that's really popular on NBC. And then he starts turning his eyes to politics. I always like to think that like 2012 set the stage for like politics happens on Twitter. These candidates are expected to be on Twitter. Lawmakers, when they get in, are supposed to sort of bring people, you know, behind closed doors, issue, you know, all sorts of their messages. The entire DC press corps gets like so wrapped up, you know, self included at times in this thing that like every micro cycle becomes like drives editorial decisions in newsrooms across everywhere. Donald Trump is like, oh, I can tap into that. I'm really good at this platform cut to November 2016. Donald Trump is elected president. This is also at a time when as I'm covering it, the harassment stuff is really, really big. I was in contact with a lot of people who were working at the company at the time. And there was just this like moment of like, I think we did this. I think we did this. I think this is on us. What was your feeling? I agreed. I think Twitter was instrumental to Donald Trump's election. I don't think it is the only force or like, you know, like I've heard the 2016 election described at various times like an airplane crash. Like, you know, there's multiple causes that in fact, you can't like really appoint it to just one thing, but you know that the plane definitely crashed. It's worth noting that on election day, November of 2016, I was in the Roosevelt room of the White House. Wouldn't that happen? Because I was working at the White House by that time and had been hired into the Obama administration because they had realized that they had lost the thread on using social media effectively after the 2014 midterms. I had this conversation with President Obama in the wake of the 2016 election, where he said, he's like, yeah, you know, he's very like, you know, all the sort of like Obama is very even. Like he does not get very hot or very angry the day after the election. Like his role was going around to staff and like bucking people up to be like, hey, this is going to be OK. We're going to be OK, which is pretty incredible. And to me, he said, he's like, you know, I'm not really happy with the results of this election. I was like, yeah, me neither, sir. I think this is this is not not good. He's like, and you know, there's a lot of reasons for why that's true. But one of them is because because of you because of Twitter. Like, and I was like, I was like, no, I I I agree. And he was doing that as like a way to like start a broader conversation about like, what do we need to do to think about the role of social media and the role of the Internet in our civic life and what it's doing, which had been a topic that had interested him long before the election. I agree with his assessment that Twitter played an outside role in that election. What Trump realized, like eight years before we sort of really kind of codified it into a thesis, was that the currency that mattered most in the contemporary environment was attention. That attention was the coin of the realm. And if you could command attention, regardless of if it was for good reasons or bad, you were winning. All you needed to do was to be able to command attention. And Twitter was very good for commanding attention because you could say something outrageous and that would get a lot of attention on Twitter. And I think like the way in which you need to understand things like meme coins and prediction markets are essentially derivatives on the attention economy, like it is essentially ways in which people have figured out how to trade trade this fundamental commodity that runs the entire world now. So Trump's president and there's this guy on the service, famous entrepreneur, Elon Musk, Musk himself, a power user of Twitter sort of gets. And this is a very common thing that happens on the platform. It's like people get captured by the platform and they both like being good at it, affect it and then it affects them and the snake eats their own tail. And like, you know, it's just an accelerationist situation where you get to someone who is radicalized in their ways. Elon Musk then goes through this whole this whole period of time in 2022 where he he flirts with basically becoming like getting a board seat, right? He sort of reverses course and says, you know what? Actually, I'm going to I'm going to buy this. I'm just going to buy it and I'm going to take it private and I'm going to totally rewire this thing and I'm going to I'm going to bring this back to the glory days toward the platform is supposed to be free speech maximalists to eat those. So I think a couple of things for context. Elon is the best example for the power of audience capture in the current environment because you're talking about a person who is worth a trillion dollars close to it can literally do anything. He's got more power than most nation states in the world. And yet his engagement on Twitter is clearly one of the most important things to him in the world, like it is clearly very meaningful to him. And the feedback that he gets from his audience on Twitter is both so important to him that he not only goes to buy the product that you know, not only goes to buy the the company that produces this product, but Joyce Carol Oates makes fun of him on Twitter for not liking things. The famous author, Joyce Carol Oates. Yes, he doesn't like things that like humans like. Right. He doesn't. Why doesn't he ever talk about his family? Why does he talk about movies? And like Joyce Carol Oates, one of our great just fire Twitters, by the way, just unreal that she's great at the product. And he spends the next like two days or two weeks like posting movies that he likes or whatever. Like it clearly got to him that he felt like the need to kind of respond to this in a so bleak way. Very curious effect of the product. So Musk buys Twitter immediately, you know, he walks in with a sink as a joke, let this sink in, slashes the workforce creates a lot of actual chaos. Fires a ton of people. And there's this feeling for a long period of time that Twitter is actually going, going to join to that. And Musk is alienating advertisers at this exact moment. He's like walking into meetings and saying stuff that makes them feel really weird and really bad about stuff. It seems that like the service isn't going to hold up in those really early days. He's also just like letting a lot of like banned people back on the service. Donald Trump can return to Twitter after being banned post January 6th. And the platform doesn't die. Doesn't die. Still doesn't die. In fact, the people who, you know, lots of power users who are in my profession or in politics come back still using it, still enjoying it, doing everything. Obviously, it leads to the 2024 election. Elon Musk really, you know, while he's doing all this, he's in the tank for Donald Trump. He's given out million dollar checks to people. He creates and a lot of people don't remember this an election hub inside Twitter or X, which he renames it X. Forgot about that. He renames it X. There is this feeling he has put his hands on the scale. He's used this platform that has his outsized political power. He's sort of turned it into this political weapon that can be directed towards his particular ideology. What does Elon Musk fundamentally understand about Twitter? Like, what is the thing that he that he truly understands and gets in ways that maybe no one else does? I think it is someone analogous to the Trump case, which is that attention is good because, you know, look, and this is always the throat clearing part about telling him about you and I hate doing it. But like he did build a rocket company. Like, you know, like he has achieved. He has built some real things. There's no one who's understood and leveraged as well. Like the ability to turn attention into market capitalization better than Elon Musk, like he really is the best who's ever done it. Some of the techniques that he's applied there are personal mythology. You know, there's a lot of personal mythologizing of Elon. He never sleeps. He sleeps on the factory floor. He's a super genius who understands everything. Twitter was a little bit risky for him, incidentally, on the super genius who understands everything, because it became very obvious in the early going that he didn't know what he was talking about with regards to global web scale design, like there's a number of high profile incidents where, like people who actually understand how global web systems have been built and Elon's not built a website since like, you know, PayPal, like will go and be like, but, you know, what do you mean? Like there's too many microservices. Like what does that actually mean to you? And he clearly doesn't have like a practitioner's understanding of that, of that problem. But like, you know, like the site does still run, right? Like, you know, it makes all these changes. The site does still run. I think Elon has managed to parlay attention into market capitalization for his companies better than the rest, because he's figured out how to both skirt and in some cases, just go over the line of what you can do. Look, I'll put myself out there. Is I did not think his experiment would work. I felt he would have to like kind of get rid of this. One of the reasons was I just didn't think the numbers. I felt like the brand risk that he was going to take on. And this is before he went on for Trump. I was like, that's just going to look bad for him. And people are going to start feeling bad about his cars and we're going to feel bad about his actual like business. Like, why is he going to want that? Additionally, Twitter was so levered in terms of the amount of debt that it had on its book that it completely froze like the it froze the banks who were holding the debt because they couldn't move it off their balance sheets during a time of rising interest rates. But he's more powerful than the street. He is able to make the largest financial institutions in the world kind of dance to his tune because his power is so unbounded by any normal constraint. There's no one else who would be able to do that. Anyone else would get called, but no one wants to call Elon. I think it is a unique example of how to use attention for market power. To kind of put a bow on it, I am curious. I mean, some of this has to do with Elon. But I think broadly speaking, I'm interested more outside of the realm of just of just him and his ownership and like the logistics of it. But why won't Twitter die? So many things happen to it. It's crazy. There's so many outsize elements of negative influence that you can. I mean, there's there's positive influence, obviously. But like when you look at it, like this is a website that was for a very long time. Its power users referred to it as the hell. Yeah. Right. So why won't it die? And I don't mean from a funding sample, but like why won't it die? Culturally, brother, I wish I knew I really, I really don't. I do find it I do find it interesting. There's a couple theories. Once you own a piece of real estate on the Internet, it does end up being pretty durable in a lot of cases, like it does end up being pretty hard to dislodge people if they're willing to kind of like fund the losses like Facebook. You know, despite its misadventures in the metaverse owns the friend graph still. Like, and despite like all of like all of like the oh, the young's don't use it. And like, you know, it's just for boomers or whatever. It's still like a core load bearing element of the Internet. And for all of the like, oh, you have to append Reddit to the end of search queries like in order to get the good results because like, you know, SEO has gotten so jacked up like Google still owns search and has owned it for 20 years. Right. Like more than 20 years at this point. It is hard to dislodge incumbents because there's no regulatory pressure. That is one of the things that traditionally has prevented incumbents from reaching a certain size and market consolidation forces are still one of the iron laws of the land. Like the bigger just eats the smaller. Again, absent any regulatory pressure or paradigmatic reshuffling of the deck. I love the introduction of the consumer Internet writ large. You don't see broad based dislocations in these mature markets. So I think that's like probably the easiest explanation. I don't think there's like one magic trick that Twitter figured out that makes it so durable. I think that the the I was very skeptical of all of the folks who kind of came along, whether that's threads or blue sky. And we're just like, we're going to do this, but better. I was like, yeah, nothing this but better ever replaces the old thing. That's just not how it works in mature markets. That can work when the market is evolving, but that doesn't usually happen in a mature media market. What is the legacy of Twitter for you? We're talking about a lot of stuff that is really negative. There's also a lot that's like really fascinating. It is the most influential piece of technology that's not a phone or something like that piece of social media in my life to my career, all these different things. Right. I have this tortured relationship with it. I'm sure you do too. But in your mind, like, where does it net out for you? What is the legacy of Twitter positive? Is it negative? Is it indeterminate? How do you feel about it? I try not to be too self-sysic about it because like the stakes are higher than just like my personal experience. And there's people I've benefited tremendously from Twitter's like ascendance, both, you know, financially as well as like the things I've been able to do in my life professionally. But it is informed by the fact that I worked on Twitter early and now Elon Musk runs it and I worked at the White House and my transition meeting was literally with Dan Scavino, who like tweets for Donald Trump to this day. And so in both of those, I kind of the what is the legacy of that? It is hard for me not to see it in the context of what is the legacy of being an American in this moment in history, where you are raised in an era where you believe certain ideological things about the country and certain things that are true and a certain belief in its core institutions and the idea of democracy and the idea of a pluralistic system in which, you know, we've gotten past and are still contending with, but have gotten past a lot of the historical injustices that defined the first 250 years of this country. And yet we live in a moment where we are seeing, you know, just the most venal, worst acting, worst aspects of American society in our lifetime. And the story of Twitter is embedded in that very deeply. And so it's it's hard for me to like reconcile both things at the same time, which is that I still believe in the ideological ideas that underpin the beginning of Twitter and also blogger, which is that the internet should be used as a medium of self-expression and that if we were to embrace it as such, people around the world would understand each other better. We would be able to experience more of one another's lived world. And that would create more empathy and understanding and that that is a good and virtuous project to be engaged with. And I'm proud of the work that I've done there. And yet what we actually have built and what has actually been produced is a platform that has created tremendous harm and is in the current moment still being used to inflict tremendous harm. You have to wrestle with both of those things. And you cannot just look at the things that you don't like and say, those are unintended use cases that I never meant to happen. Your intention doesn't really play into the answer there. You know, we've talked a lot about the cultural relevance of Twitter and the fact that it can't die. There's this way in which it was very, very important for all these different genres of niche communities. You know, you've got like like Black Twitter was an absolutely like foundational one for this type of culture that really influenced not only the platform, but culture at large in general. We're talking about, you know, Elon and Trump and these guys and being really good at using it. And I think that, you know, there's this way in which especially two dudes who have so much history with the platform, like over indexing its cultural relevance now, like I think there's there's a feeling that like the culture outside of politics and outside of like Edgelord racist, Trumpian politics has actually moved on, right? When you have TikTok and these ascended platforms where these communities are going and where, you know, sort of like the bleeding edge of culture happens. Like, do you think that like, I don't know, is that is that an exercise? Is that a threat to Twitter going forward? I think there's an optimistic version of the story there, which is like that Twitter by in the Elon era, foregrounding so vociferously his parochial cultural interests by being so overt about the cultural change that he wanted to see in the world. It creates its own natural backlash because it becomes it ends up becoming defined as a period in time. And I think you're right, which is that culture is being made in other places. Like when TikTok became ascendant, I felt the same way about it that I do about what I did about Twitter, which is just I love TikTok. I think it is so exciting. It is a place where culture gets made and you see these little pockets of where it's, you know, for, you know, some feels like something that was made for you and your entertainment. I think it is a much more dangerous and weaponized version of social media than what we were doing with Twitter because it is so precise and is so weaponized. I do think Twitter could be like sort of the thing where when I got to the White House and was working in communications, I was surprised to learn about the centrality of like Morning Joe as a show that was really important for how people, the most powerful people in the world thought about where content was being shaped. Um, and I was like, I've never heard of this show. What is the show? People are shocked. I've never heard of it, but it is very important for how like narrative is shaped. And Twitter could be something like that where it is like, you know, a version of legacy media that is in absolute terms very, very small and for certain cultural making aspects been replaced by other platforms. But for some powerful part of the demographic, older, male, white, you know, people in politics, people in news, it still is the Morning Joe of its time for the next, you know, 15 years. Jason, thank you for walking me through this. This is great. We speed ran it, but I really do it. I think that this is like a pretty good how a bill becomes a law that destroys civilization and the fabric of democracy in reality. So I think we, I think we did do it. I appreciate your insights and thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you again to my guests, Jason Goldman. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain Drop every Friday and you could subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow journalists at the Atlantic, you could subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com slash listener. That's the Atlantic dot com slash listener. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you on the internet. This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Clark and engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Rob Smersiak. Clarina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.