Old Twitter had a useful tool – the blue tick – to combat this. Users could not receive one unless they demonstrated some area expertise, usually reflected by published work or an advanced degree. This was a powerful filtering device. It allowed users to know that a poster claiming to be a doctor or physicist was in fact qualified to speak in those areas.
This changed when Mr Musk bought Twitter and moved to selling blue ticks instead. Mr Musk also eased the platform’s content controls, laying off employees in content moderation and relying more heavily on users and automated systems to flag harmful content.
The result has been a decline in the number of active users on X, and the movement of some users to alternatives, most notably Bluesky, founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
However, Bluesky’s 3.5 million daily users are still dwarfed by X’s 130 million daily users. X benefits enormously from first-mover and network benefits. Because Twitter was the first micro-blogging site, it accumulated a huge number of users, and that mass then acted as a draw for yet more users.
The sheer size of X acts as a magnet to retain otherwise disgruntled users, and is almost certainly why Mr Musk has not purged bots from the platform. They artificially inflate the user base and crowd out alternative platforms.
This may explain why X has only gone so far as to roll out transparency features, rather than to take more stringent action on flagged accounts. The site financially benefits from its large base, irrespective of whether they are bots, trolls or profiteering foreigners.
Mr Musk will not bring back the blue tick, and social media has become more toxic to open societies. For myself, I rarely use it now, and I do not recommend it to my students either. We are all better off reading serious information than doomscrolling fake news on our phones.
Robert Kelly is a professor of political science at Pusan National University. He writes a monthly column for CNA, published every second Monday.
