What Twitter Changes Might Mean for Academics
ProfHacker 2014-09-08
If you’re a regular user of Twitter, as many of us at ProfHacker are, you’ve no doubt seen the many posts speculating on Twitter’s impeding demise. Twitter, along with every other social network, gets declared dead on a regular basis. However, earlier this year Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer wrote “A Eulogy for Twitter” in the Atlantic and observed:
“ Twitter’s earnings last quarter, after all, were an improvement on the period before, and it added 14 million new users for a total of 255 million. The thing is: Its users are less active than they once were. Twitter says these changes reflect a more streamlined experience, but we have a different theory: Twitter is entering its twilight.”
In light of these predictions, it’s not surprising that Twitter is contemplating some big changes to how it handles content and discourse. Twitter has always been notable for avoiding the algorithmic approach favored by Facebook and other social media. The hierarchy of information on Twitter is clear: the most recent tweets are always at the top, and when you log in to your timeline, the majority of your attention is focused on a constantly refreshing portrait of the moment. Content that is regularly retweeted by people you follow is more likely to appear in any time snapshot you view, and thus retweets are a way of maintaining visibility even as the hierarchy stays time-based.
Time-based organization works really well for many popular academic uses of Twitter–particularly conferences, where it’s easy to find an interesting panel or meet-up in the moment, while the rest of the timeline becomes one historical record of the conference interactions. However, it’s precisely the timeline that may be at risk, as Yoree Koh of the Wall Street Journal reported on “Twitter’s larger aim to better organize its content–to separate the interesting and timely tweets form the noise.” However, it’s precisely in the noise that most of the small conversations of academics and other Twitter users might be found. It’s since been clarified that the first step Twitter plans is not a full-on algorithmic filter, but, as Eric Geller of the Washington Post writes, a solution to “the problem of important content disappearing quickly..Twitter might resurface tweets from people whom the user already follows if the company deems those tweets important.”
However, even this type of algorithmic prioritizing can have a strong future influence on what discourse gets the most attention. Zeynep Tufekci offers a great look at the consequences of a potential curated Twitter, and compares the discourse on Twitter to Facebook:
“Twitter brims with human judgment, and the problem with algorithmic filtering is not losing the chronology, which I admit can be clumsy at times, but it’s losing the human judgment that makes the network rewarding and sometimes unpredictable. I also recently wrote about how #Ferguson surfaced on Twitter while it remained buried, at least for me, in curated Facebook-as many others noted, Facebook was awash with the Ice Bucket Challenge instead, which invites likes and provides videos and tagging of others; just the things an algorithm would value.”
For those of us who use Twitter as a meeting-place for our professional community, as a stream of new ideas and revelations, or even as part of our classrooms, these pending changes to the platform could abruptly transform Twitter’s viability for our discourse. And if these changes go mostly unnoticed, we may not even know what’s gone missing from the feed. Moments like these are in part an opportunity to take stock of our reliance on corporate-determined algorithms for information and discourse, and to think about the ways our practices will necessarily evolve as a result of these types of changes.