Twitter Is Dead, Long Live the Portal

Twitter is officially dead. Last week, twitter.com became x.com, marking the final step in a rebranding effort that the company’s owner, Elon Musk, announced last year. The change marks a shift for the now birdless app under Musk’s reign, which has welcomed Nazis and white supremacists back to the platform, dissolved its Trust and Safety council, and has become a cesspool of disinformation and conspiracy. Meanwhile, people seem to still long for authentic connection—like with the Dublin to New York portal that connects the cities through a live videostream. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we trace Twitter's demise and delve into what the rise of the portal could mean for the evolution of how we talk to each other and consume politics online.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I'm Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Twitter is officially dead. That is, if it wasn't already. Last week, twitter.com became x.com, the final step in a rebranding effort that the company's owner, Elon Musk, announced last year. The change marks the end of an era. Twitter used to call itself a global town square, but since Musk's takeover in 2022, the platform has welcomed back formerly banned Nazis and white supremacists. It's dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, which advised Twitter on how to address problems like hate speech and child exploitation. And it's laid off thousands of people, including many on its content moderation team. The result? Advertisers have left, users have left, and what remains on the site is a cesspool of disinformation and conspiracies. Today on the show, we dissect the end of Twitter and what it means for the politicians who use it. Later, we're going to talk about the last good place to connect with others with the help of technology, the live videostream portal connecting Dublin and New York. I'm joined today by David Gilbert and Makena Kelly, two senior reporters at WIRED, to talk about all of this. Makena, David, welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. How's it going?

Makena Kelly: Hello.

David Gilbert: It's going good. Just back from the portal in Dublin so I'm full of joy and happiness.

Leah Feiger: I can't wait to hear about all of that. But let's start with Elon Musk. If I was to trace back the end of Twitter, it would obviously start with him. David, why did Musk buy Twitter? Take us back to that time.

David Gilbert: I have a feeling he was thinking about buying Twitter for a while. He had been one of the main characters on Twitter for years and had always been very vocal in his opinions and the kind of content that he posted there. But from 2020 onwards, once Donald Trump got kicked off the platform and there was a major shutdown on content in relation to Covid-19 and the vaccines, he became increasingly outraged at what he saw as this over-censorious thing where he felt that people of a certain viewpoint were being silenced on the platform. Of course, that was something that not only Musk had, but a lot of Conservatives felt as well, that they were being silenced. It was bubbling along for a while, the idea that he was going to buy it. He was being urged on by a lot of his supporters, and he has a lot of supporters, to say that he should buy it, he should take it over and turn it into their utopian social media platform. In early 2022, he did. He decided to table a bid of $44 billion. Very quickly, he decided then to turn around and say, "No, actually I don't want to do that."

[Archival audio clip]: Then you changed your mind again and decided to buy it. Did you do that-

Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Well, I kind of had to.

[Archival audio clip]: Right. Did you do that because you thought that a court would make you do that?

Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Yes.

[Archival audio clip]: Right.

Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Yes, that is the reason.

Leah Feiger: I always forget that. I always forget that and I love it so much.

David Gilbert: He doesn't really remind people of it too much. It finally went through and Musk took over, and very quickly made changes. I'm not sure, at that point, Makena, do you think that he really had a vision in mind for what his version of Twitter was going to look like?

Makena Kelly: No, I don't think it was a vision more than it was a vengeance.

David Gilbert: Yeah.

Makena Kelly: If you look at that time, it's around the same time that regulators, even just the news, there's more skepticism about what it is that Elon Musk is doing. He's not this messiah character who's going to carry us into some beautiful progressive world where we all drive autonomous vehicles and have solar panels on our houses. People were starting to be a lot more critical of him. Twitter is a space where you have news makers, taste makers, very important people on this platform who are using it every day and that's where you can really drive a lot of conversation. I feel like Elon Musk, even if it wasn't front-of-mind, I think he at least knew subconsciously that having some kind of power over this platform would be helpful to him and his brand.

Leah Feiger: Like you guys have said, it was such a political space at the time, when he got into it. Journalists, celebrities, politicians, everyone was engaging in endless conversation, political scandals aplenty. But it was very political and it seemed like Must wanted in on that. After he bought Twitter, he did a ton of things right away. Talk us through some of the changes he made in the company.

David Gilbert: It happened really quickly. If you look back at it now, it's startling to remember just how quickly he changed things. He eliminated the Trust and Safety team that Twitter had built up over the years to help stifle the disinformation on the platform. They had had quite a bit of success in the years prior to Musk buying it making the platform much safer than it had been. But virtually overnight, he got rid of most of them and forced the others to leave because of the work practices that he implemented.

[Archival audio clip]: Thousands of Twitter employees were laid off today and the news of the termination came in an email.

[Archival audio clip]: They stuck with Twitter through all the uncertainty, only to be laid off into this economy.

David Gilbert: One employee famously posted a picture of herself sleeping under her desk because she was working throughout the night at Twitter at the time. Another major step he took is that he got rid of the verified blue check marks that people had been given across politics, journalism, the media. People who were well known and had their identities verified on the platform had been given these blue marks so you could trust that those people were who they said they were. Musk felt that it was a two-tiered system. Instead, he implemented a new system where you could pay for one of those blue check marks, paying him for the premium subscription, and you get a whole load of other benefits I guess, along with that, including the fact that you can monetize your content. Instead of posting content that was verified, and truthful, and interesting, and that people genuinely thought others would be interested in, people began posting content solely to feed the algorithm. And began posting content quickly, instantly after major incidents happened. It just turned Twitter upside down overnight because it meant that no longer were trusted accounts at the top of your feed. Instead, you were getting these people who were paying $8 a month to have a blue check mark next to their name and their content was being promoted higher in your feed, whether or not it was truthful. More often than not, it was disinformation or misinformation that was being promoted.

Makena Kelly: It wasn't really even just changing the policy on this, and changing all the blue checks and stuff. He also was inviting back people who had previously been cast off.

Leah Feiger: There was so much fallout from this. Advertisers left, tons of people exited the platform. Elon Musk got into a huge fight with NPR and called them "state affiliated media," effectively accusing them of propaganda for the government. Which then caused NPR to leave the platform, understandably. Which I guess brings me to, do you guys think that Musk has actually accomplished what he's wanted to? Obviously, a lot of people have eulogized the end of Twitter, so I really want to stay on the politics of it all.

Makena Kelly: Has he done what he wanted to do? I think kind of and kind of not. The internet was already on this path towards breaking up and splintering off into dozens of different sites where it's very difficult to basically create a monoculture. There is no monoculture anymore. I think Twitter and a lot of these social platforms were the reason why a lot of big trends and stuff happened in the 2010s.

Leah Feiger: Like you said, just having white supremacists and Nazis back on the platform, this is an entirely different space now.

David Gilbert: It's completely different. He's welcomed back Nick Fuentes, who is anti-Semite and white supremacist, as well as Alex Jones, a world-renowned conspiracist who has become bankrupt after spreading rumors and conspiracies about school shootings. It's a completely different environment. I think people were hanging on, hoping that something might change and it might go back to the way it was, where people could have genuine conversations, could genuinely use it as a newsfeed, effectively, which is what a lot of people used Twitter for, especially under breaking news circumstances. But that just didn't happen. Things kept getting worse, and worse, and worse. More and more people left the platform. While there still is some mainstream politicians using the site, the vast majority of the biggest accounts, political accounts on the platform now are those who espouse a right-wing viewpoint. And in a lot of cases, a far-right viewpoint. That's something clearly that Musk has embraced and is something that Musk has, I guess, wanted to do for a long time because he's had relationships with a lot of these figures, even before he became CEO of Twitter, back in 2022.

Leah Feiger: What kind of political conspiracies and disinformation are spreading on the platform that are different than before?

David Gilbert: I suppose it's the speed and pacing. For example, we saw last week, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot at an event where he was speaking. Obviously it was within minutes, it wasn't even hours, it was within minutes, the entire platform was just flooded with disinformation. If you put Robert Fico's name into the search bar on Twitter, all you got was ... They call themselves OSINT accounts, or open source intelligences accounts, but they're nothing like that. All they're doing is trying to game the system so that their content is at the top of the newsfeed. None of the content is fact checked, none of it is verified. It's all speculative. They just began spreading disinformation about who the shooter was or who was behind it.

Leah Feiger: They blamed Ukraine, which was wild, within minutes. That was wild to watch happen.

David Gilbert: It wasn't the only disinformation campaign being spread about this, but it was one of the main ones. It was also being driven at the time, which we found out later and we reported on, a coordinated disinformation influence operation run by the Kremlin. This was picked up by the blue check mark accounts that proliferate on Twitter these days and they just spread it everywhere.

Leah Feiger: Right.

David Gilbert: Without checking anything, without doing any due diligence. I think it was John Scott Railton who summed it up quite well. He's a researcher for Citizen Lab and he looks at Twitter quite a lot. He just said, "It's become a useless morass of disinformation around the Robert Fico shooting. Try searching for his name, almost certainly the top results I get are contradictory conspiracy theories. Good luck even surfacing fact checked, substantiated information."

Leah Feiger: Wow.

David Gilbert: That succinctly sums up the experience of Twitter every single time breaking news happens now.

Makena Kelly: It sucks too, because no platform has really come back to take Twitter's place in this.

Leah Feiger: No!

Makena Kelly: I feel like every single time we have some breaking news event, I am going to Twitter, getting overwhelmed. Just a couple minutes ago, when we were recording this, I was on Twitter and I saw that there was news breaking that the RNC was being evacuated because of some kind of substance in the building. I'm going through there and some people are reporting white powder, and others were tweeting about vials of blood. Of course, the Jack Posobiecs, the people who spread this information all the time, they are grasping onto that vials of blood thing even though I haven't really seen it confirmed anywhere.

Leah Feiger: Of course not.

Makena Kelly: These narratives get pushed so fast and they go so viral without any way to fact check them or counteract them because of all the changes that Musk has made.

Leah Feiger: Breaking news is so hard to do in the best of times. Especially now with the siloization of the internet, we have information coming from all corners. Now with Musk's Twitter, it just feels this is the best example of that. With all of that, how are politicians adapting to all of these changes?

Makena Kelly: Sure. We have of course seen Biden on TikTok. We have seen Trump doing whatever he's doing with inviting influencers over to go see him. But I think the big thing happening right now is relational organizing. Back in 2021, 2022, the Ossoff campaign and the Warnock campaigns in Georgia were some of the first to really experiment with relational organizing at scale. When I talk about relational organizing, what I'm talking about is when voters post memes, they host events, they have group chats. They just talk to their people at church and they tell them everything about voting. But it is supported with the tools and the information, and the other stuff coming from political groups. They had the information and they had the materials they need to have these conversations. That has definitely grown a lot recently. The Biden campaign of course is experimenting with its own. There was a Washington Post story last year about how, when the Tailor Swift album was getting ready to come out ... This would have actually only been a couple months ago. Some of these relational organizers were throwing events at schools, creating the beaded bracelets that we so are accustomed.

Leah Feiger: I love it. I absolutely love it. It's so interesting. No one trusts strangers on the internet anymore, which I suppose is not the most shocking revelation. But it's wild to see the democratic machine acknowledge that and figure out ways around it. In this fragmented online world, I suppose that really makes sense. David, I wanted to talk also about the recent reporting from the New York Times that found how some politicians, specifically right-winged leaders from around the world, have actually been taking advantage of Musk's takeover of Twitter.

David Gilbert: Yeah. It goes back again to looking back at Musk's history. He's been doing this for a long time. I think it was 2015 when Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, visited the Tesla factory in California. It's an interesting move because for years, Musk has kowtowed to these authoritarian figures because he wants to get SpaceX or Tesla into the countries, such as India or China so he's been talking to Xi Jinping, and many other countries where he wants to be able to get access to markets, or in some cases access to raw materials. It's likely that the takeover of Twitter probably had something to do or is part of the calculus he was thinking that, if he has this platform and he's able to support these authoritarian figures on the platform, then that may help him in other areas of his business. Or maybe that was completely a coincidence. Who knows? It's hard to tell.

Leah Feiger: In the New York Times article, reporters found that Musk vocally supporting India's Narendra Modi on X may have actually led to Musk getting lower import tariffs for Tesla. Or in Brazil, support for Bolsonaro may have led to Musk getting a new market for Starlink. Those are very specific connections to make. This has become his own little business marketplace that used to be very different.

David Gilbert: Yeah. I think the one that got me most was Javier Milei in Argentina. When he became President, Musk fated him on the platform and he had shared videos about him. One of them was actually I think Musk's most viewed post ever. But what it turns out is that, as the Times reported, is that Argentina is one of the biggest sources, has the most natural reserves of lithium, which is an element that is one of the main components of the Tesla's car battery. Very soon after Milei became President, he began pushing for major benefits to international lithium miners, which could potentially give Tesla a much more stable and cheaper source for-

Leah Feiger: It's so wild.

David Gilbert: Lithium in the future. Those very direct impacts of how Musk is wooing these international leaders gets very interesting. It shows how he is leveraging his platform in a way that is beneficial to him directly, rather than necessarily beneficial to his users.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. It's no wonder the trust is so weak at the moment. If we're thinking ahead, what does the internet or political communications online look like next?

Makena Kelly: Yeah. I think it just becomes increasingly more vulcanized like we've been seeing because there is no one platform where people congregate online. Of course, there never really was.

Leah Feiger: Right.

Makena Kelly: But just even five years ago, there were so many fewer options. Today, I can make any Discord server, a subreddit, a group chat, a Telegram channel, a group meet. You get what I'm saying. Everyone can make whatever and have how many people in a certain group, and talk in a more intimate and private setting.Campaigns are recognizing this. I think political groups are also recognizing this. They're recruiting people from these small, but of course deeply engaged communities, whether it's online like we're talking about in group chats, and also offline like churches and other places where people gather. These people act as ambassadors on the campaign's behalf. Of course, these folks can communicate more authentically with the people in these communities because they're the ones who are actually a part of it.

Leah Feiger: That makes sense.

David Gilbert: I was speaking to the researcher, Renee DiResta recently, she's got a new book coming out called Invisible Rulers. She speaks about bespoke realities, where pretty much every single person has a different reality online because of the choices they make in terms of the platforms they use or the services that they interact with. You could be living next door to someone and their view of the world based on what they see online could be absolutely entirely different from you. Even someone who's living in the same house as you, if they are consuming content either online or via TV, or even on the radio, that is markedly different from yours, which is much, much easier to do now because everyone has carved out these areas online for themselves where they know what their worldview is and they can get that fed back to them by the people they're listening to.

Leah Feiger: Speaking of different worlds, I can't wait to talk more about the New York-Dublin portal. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we're back, we're going to go through the portal, a remnant of global connectivity. Before we take a break, we want to give a big shout-out and thank you to our friends at Amazon Music naming WIRED Politics Lab one of the best podcasts this week. Welcome to the new listeners of the show. We're so excited to give you even more of the reporting and conversations you're looking for. Welcome back. A portal has been opened between New York City and Dublin. Obviously, not a real portal, you can't transport from one place to the other, but you can see the cities through a live video screen. While the original idea was to connect people across borders, the portal quickly became a bit of a mess.

[Archival audio clip]: She was arrested in Dublin on day one for twerking at the portal. But nothing beats the wild antics of this woman in New York. She lifted her shirt and flashed stunned onlookers in Ireland.

Leah Feiger: After closing for a few days, it reopened this week. David, you and Amanda Hoover went to each side of the portal to write about it for WIRED. You were obviously on the Dublin side.

David Gilbert: Yeah, I was. It was great. We waved at each other from 3000 miles away.

Leah Feiger: Ah, I love it. Can you describe this thing for people who haven't seen it?

David Gilbert: Sure. It's a 3.4 meter tall circular installation, art installation is how they describe it. In the middle of it, it's got a circular screen and just above the screen is a camera. There's one in New York, there's one in Dublin. They are connected in real time so that someone who's standing in New York can wave and someone in Dublin. The idea is that it's this digital bridge that brings people together. The plan is to have them effectively all over the world. There are two already in Eastern Europe and there's plans for the next one I think in Brazil. It's this idea by the artist that he wants to bring people together in a way that's unique and different than connecting online digitally via social media.

Leah Feiger: Do we know why New York and Dublin were the two cities chosen?

David Gilbert: They just put their hands up. They saw what was happening in Poland and Lithuania, where the initial two portals were connected. They got in touch with the artist and they said, "We want to do something similar." They found local organizations who were willing to help host the portal and they got it together. Finally, earlier this month, the portals finally opened.

Makena Kelly: What types of organizations are these, that are supporting them?

David Gilbert: In Dublin, it's Dublin City Council and the Tourist Board. It's very much, in Dublin, a tourist-centric location. It's just off O'Connell Street near the GPO, which is a very historic building in Ireland where the Irish Freedom Fighters came in 1916. In New York, it's a local community organization, it's in the Flatiron District in New York. They just want to bring people together in some way. It's really interesting, given how connected we are in 2024.

Leah Feiger: It got shut down last week and then reopened. What happened there?

David Gilbert: It opened on May 8th and it was running 24/7. I think in the New York side, there was some security but in Dublin there was no security. It started off initially quite nicely. There was grandmothers and grandsons seeing each other through the portal. A woman in Dublin proposed to her boyfriend, who's in New York and he said yes. It was really nice. But quickly, there was news stories coming out and video clips being shared online which showed, I think one of the initial problems was that people in Dublin were going up to the camera, holding up their phones and showing footage from 9/11 on the phones.

Leah Feiger: That's harsh.

David Gilbert: Yeah. The response from New York, which I found funny as an Irishman, was they began holding up potatoes. Some people got upset about that. It was like come on, I don't understand people getting upset about that. Then there was a woman in Dublin who was seen grinding up against the portal and she was escorted away by the police. Again, not something I think is terribly awful, but anyway. Then the final straw I think was when an OnlyFans influencer from New York went in front of the New York portal and flashed the people in Dublin.

Leah Feiger: But none of that was really your experience when you went to the portal this week, right?

David Gilbert: No. As I said, they shut it down and they put in some more security in place. They reopened it five days later. I went there yesterday. I had been prepared to see a lot of people behaving badly and inappropriately, and whatever. It was just the complete opposite. It was just joyful and it was happy, and people were smiling. I'm a pretty cynical person generally, I'm not sure if you've noticed.

Leah Feiger: Definitely not.

David Gilbert: I just found it really heartwarming. It just felt as if people were there just solely, not necessarily to see anyone in particular. Obviously there were people who were there to see specific people and they had arranged to meet up. But most people were just there to wave at random strangers walking to work in New York.

Leah Feiger: That's really beautiful.

David Gilbert: It is. I think Amanda had the same experience in New York. She just found it really nice. There was nothing nasty about it. Even in Dublin, there was one woman who the police were trying to get out of the way because she was just standing in front and dancing. She was singing Eminem and telling people not to be on drugs.

Makena Kelly: Inspiring.

David Gilbert: But she was just dancing. One of the ambassadors, he wouldn't say he was a security guard, he's a Dublin Portal Ambassador. He was saying if that's the worst thing that's happening, then what's wrong with it? She's just dancing and trying to entertain people.

Leah Feiger: Let's bring this back to the rest of the episode. What does this all have to do with politics? What does this really say about how we communicate with each other online or in public spaces like this?

David Gilbert: Well, I think it goes back to what I was expecting. The artist behind this, I spoke to him, and he was saying that the bad behavior that shut down the portals in the first place was a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall experience people had in Dublin and in New York. The reason that that is why we were interested in it is because that's what the algorithms were feeding people. I think it shows how we've become so used to extreme opinions now because that's what social media algorithms are feeding us that we can't really see beyond that and see what may be the reality of things. That's potentially troubling, given that our politicians and our lawmakers are doing the same thing.

Makena Kelly: I would love if the portal or someone created an Instagram account where they curated all of these wholesome moments as a destination.

Leah Feiger: Oh, that would be so wonderful.

Makena Kelly: I would love, it would be a wholesome place on the internet.

David Gilbert: I agree with you completely. I think it would be great. But you would have to purposely seek it out. Trying to find that kind of content is really difficult now because of the way the internet is set up these days.

Leah Feiger: Listeners, we're going to be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. But in the meantime, we would love to hear about how your experiences of the internet have changed over the last five years. Write to us at politicslab@wired.com. That's politicslab@wired.com.

Welcome back. It is time for Conspiracy of the Week, where David and Makena are going to bring their favorite conspiracies of the week to me, and I'm going to vote on the winner. David, what do you have for us?

David Gilbert: It's kind of a callback conspiracy from a few years ago that you may have heard of, but it's been reactivated recently. I don't know if you remember a term called luciferase. This is something that was going around during the Covid pandemic. It's an enzyme that was used in some of the testing before Covid vaccines were created. It wasn't in any of the Covid vaccines. But that didn't stop the conspiracy theorists at the time claiming that luciferase was in the actual vaccines themselves. Obviously, because it's called luciferase, that implies that it has something to do with Satan, or satanism, or satanic cults.

Leah Feiger: Yes, very devilish over here.

David Gilbert: Yes, yes. There was 6.66 CCs of something in it, so obviously.

Leah Feiger: Of course.

David Gilbert: I think at the time, one of the big posts said you couldn't make this stuff up, but obviously you can. That's fine, that was maybe 2021, 2022. It disappeared for a while. But it's back. At a conference, a conspiracy conference recently ... Christiane Northrup is her name. She used to be a new-age health guru doctor who was really well known. I think she was on Oprah. She was pretty mainstream. She quickly pivoted into conspiracy stuff during the Covid vaccine. At a recent conference, she said that "luciferase is now fully activated." Anyone who has had an mRNA vaccine is now their own tracking device. She said that “when you go through an airport, they're able to track you via the machines that you go through during security because this luciferase has been activated in your blood." I'm not sure why they believe it's been turned on now, but it has. Basically, the government, and Bill Gates, and everyone else in the elite cabal that is controlling the world, is able to track you anywhere you go in the world if you have taken an mRNA vaccine in recent years.

Leah Feiger: OK. Well, that feels like a pretty heavy one for the week. Makena, what do you have?

Makena Kelly: Mine isn't that heavy. I'm sure everyone heard this week that Red Lobster was filing for bankruptcy.

Leah Feiger: Oh, no! A Red Lobster conspiracy? I missed this.

Makena Kelly: Well, I don't think it's necessarily a conspiracy. It is, but I think this one's real. I believe it. Last year, of course, Red Lobster started their Endless Shrimp thing. People are saying that, and I think it makes sense, that the Endless Shrimp is what sunk the business and that's why it's filing for bankruptcy. But if you pull the curtain back a little bit, recently Red Lobster was acquired by a private equity company that bought the land under Red Lobster and then started leasing it back out to all the restaurants. Everything just became a lot more expensive for them to run. Ultimately, I think that's probably more likely the reason that Red Lobster is now bankrupt rather than just Endless Shrimp.

Leah Feiger: Oh, man. I never actually made it in for Endless Shrimp, and I felt such a pang of FOMO the minute that that got released. Very, very sad. OK, I loved the intricacies of David's conspiracies, and I always want to talk about Red Lobster, so I think I'm going to have to declare this week a tie. No one's a winner, but thank you so much for joining us this week.

David Gilbert: You're welcome. It was fun.

Makena Kelly: Yeah. Bye!

Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter which Makena writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments or show suggestions, please write to politicslab@wired.com. That's politicslab@wired.com. We're excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. Greg Obis at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Jordan Bell is EP of development and Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast. I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week.