Word came today that Twitter may be seeking to destroy Twitter.
As first reported by GigaOm's Matthew Ingram, Twitter chief financial officer Anthony Noto said the short message digital service will start to use algorithms to "curate" more of your Twitter feed, steering you and millions of others toward tweets and other content we're all more likely to like, retweet, click on share, and ultimately, use to power buying decisions.
As a powerful platform for social change underlying reports of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries, Twitter's unredacted timeline - you can get everything you sign up for - is a promise of truth and transparency.
A curated timeline powered by an algorithm designed to increase advertising sales kills the service as a vital network for change, dissent, disruption, and political action.
As Forbes colleague Jeff Bercovici said so well: "Product innovation is like gentrification: The more you love what it’s given you ... the more you wish it would stop right now before the thing you love changes again."
Now Twitter may become a shorter form Facebook. Nothing wrong with that. I'm something of a Facebook defender among digital change analysts. Facebook itself is also a center for social organizing and campaigns. But its timeline is heavily curated, weighted toward ad sales. Sometimes this actually levels the playing field for small nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and cause-makers. Heck where else can you buy thousands of qualified eyeballs for twenty bucks? I actually like Facebook's model for sales involving causes, though I wish it would create a Google-like program of grants for free nonprofit ads. And let's face it, the Ice Bucket Challenge is the great Facebook campaign of all time. And frankly, authentic as heck for the Facebook network.
But Twitter is - and always has been - different.
When Iranian opposition leaders worried that a Twitter maintenance shutdown would stifle dissent and their organizing ability, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (successfully) lobbied the company to postpone the maintenance.
When Occupy Wall Street reached beyond those on the ground in a small park in lower Manhattan, their words and videos and message was carried by an unredacted Twitter.
When organizers and pro-democracy activists in Egypt and Turkey and Kiev and many other places in the last few years rallied support outside their countries, they sent those calls and messages and reports with an unredacted, uncurated Twitter.
When people marched in Ferguson, MO, Twitter provided the real-time reports, the timeline, the authenticity of the event and the outrage.
Filtering Twitter is shutting down dissent, and it's anti-democratic.
Of course, Twitter is a business and its shareholders are interested in growth and revenue. But in my view, those are both dependent upon its underlying value proposition - the essence of what makes Twitter what it is, why it's used by Beyonce and LeBron and Barack Obama and Rand Paul and the Rolling Stones and me. It doesn't have a filter. Facebook does. News services do. Almost everything else does. The unfiltered quality of Twitter in its purest form is its value - creating an algorithm for what I see destroys it. It may as well be Friendster or MySpace after that.
"The key to this power isn't the reverse chronology but rather the fact that the network allows humans to exercise free judgment on the worth of content, without strong algorithmic biases," wrote digital sociologist Zeynep Tufekci on Medium today. "That cumulative, networked freedom is what extends the range of what Twitter can value and surface, and provides some of the best experiences of Twitter."
She's right. The pushback against today's report was strong. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted: "Goodness, what an absurd synthesis of what was said." But it was interesting to note the tone of Twitter's defenders in the Silicon Valley tech press. Here's San Jose Mercucy News writer Jeremy Owens going to the mat for the company: "Twitter knows it needs to offer a differentiated product to lure and retain new users, who will likely find curated feeds -- such as Facebook's timeline -- more useful." That message was pretty clear - kind of the flipside of Costolo's classic non-denial denial. Understandably, Twitter and its shareholders want to grow revenue.
And it doesn't matter if the social fabric of connected citizens movements around the world grows a little weaker because of it.
