Twitter Turns 15 and Faces Growing Popularity Pains – Political Change

The social network is a megaphone for politicians, celebrities and ordinary people, but it also struggles to create rules for speech.

By Tina Trinh

NEW YORK – Twitter celebrates its 15th anniversary this month (March 21). With 330 million users worldwide, the company that once called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party has been forced to grapple with abuses on its platform.

In 2006, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet, and now it’s hard to believe that the social network turns 15 this month, and that that original tweet is currently fetching $ 2.5 million from an online auction. .

What began as a microblog with 140-character entries has since become a megaphone for celebrities, world leaders, and activists around the world.

“It’s been literally, you know, a kind of digital commons or public sphere where people can interact … It’s also very simple in terms of the user interface, something that they have maintained all along,” he notes.

Murthy, a professor and author of two books on Twitter, says there is a certain level of democratization that remains attractive to users.

“People can be very honest and they can get answers very quickly and they can get answers from people they may not have gotten them from,” he explains.

The speed and scale at which information travels on Twitter has also played a critical role in social movements around the world, says Sinan Aral of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

In his comments with the VOA, also on Skype, he points out that: “The founders of the Black Lives Matter movement say that there would be no Black Lives Matter movement without social networks” He adds that, “It was also a catalyst, obviously during the Arab Spring, the Snow Revolution in Russia, the protest movements in Hong Kong and other parts of Ukraine ”.

But, Aral, clarifies that the promise of unrestricted communication has led to conspiracy theories and misinformation.

“We studied ten years of their (Twitter) data, and found that fake news traveled further, faster, deeper and broader than the truth in each category of information, and fake political news was the most viral.”

Precisely that resulted in the banning of a very public figure this year. We discussed this issue via Skype with Irina Raicu, from the Internet Ethics Program of the University of Santa Clara, who indicates: “I think what you really need to prioritize and think to move forward is, how will you deal with the emergence of the next Donald? Trump? “

Raicu thinks that, “it is very difficult when you have a figure like that who is probably very good for business.”

But in the absence of government regulation, the internet ethicist says Twitter has a responsibility to moderate content.

“It’s going to be very difficult, in the context of some countries, to act as the kind of platform that I think it wants to be, that enables the kind of conversations that it wants to enable.”

One thing many critics agree on is that on its 15th anniversary, the company that once called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party has yet to grow.

Voice of america

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