Elon Musk's Twitter Signals New Horrors for Self-Promotion
Does anyone really want to pay for Twitter influence?
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Many of us could probably think of a thousand people and organizations we’d rather put $8 a month toward than Elon Musk and Twitter. Musk, who wildly overpaid for the platform and incurred debt estimated to cost $1 billion in annual interest alone, has announced that Twitter will start charging $8 for Twitter Blue, which includes the blue check verification symbol. Those who don’t pay would lose their blue check, which has long telegraphed that a Twitter account really belongs to a certain person.
The sector of fashion and tangential industries that Musks’s changes are likely to most affect is not brands that prop Twitter up with ad dollars, but the individual content creators and influencers who make the platform interesting, many of whom probably feel like they can’t leave. They will in all likelihood find themselves with a hard choice to make about whether or not to pay for it, not only because of the Muskness of it all, but also because we’re now faced with the sick prospect of paying for misery-inducing online self-promotion.
Twitter’s significance has declined for many content creators over the past decade, but I suspect many of us are hesitant to leave because of the pressure to have our own audience. Since the dawn of Facebook’s newsfeed in 2006, creating an online personal brand has gone from feeling like a nice-to-have to a necessity. However, building an audience requires a lot of work, and most of us do that work for the benefit of social media companies more so than any immediate measurable benefit to ourselves. We’re not getting paid for the majority of what we post, and we’re not even enjoying posting much of the time. We’re doing it in case it might lead us to get paid for something in the future, be that writing assignments, sponsored content, speaking gigs, salaried jobs, writing books, whatever.
Those of you who work in media or content, either in fashion or not, are surely expected to have a firm grasp on the machinations of all social platforms. Probably the best way to demonstrate that is to actually use all the platforms and develop followings. Whatever your career goal may be — to host a podcast, become a thought leader, host television, or simply be self-employed — social media is likely crucial for success (the exceptions would probably be the Maureen Dowd types who became famous before we had social media). Anyone who is going to pay you for your thought leadership or content is going to see if you have a built-in audience and can self-market because long form content made by an individual is extremely hard to market. A book doesn’t sell well because it’s published by Flatiron Books, it sells well because it’s written by Matthew Perry.
Yet we also know that social media use can lead to a lower quality of life. Even if you’re not getting trolled or harassed when you’re online (and many journalists do), study after study shows that scrolling through curated tweets, photos, and videos of other people’s lives can lower self-esteem. Research has suggested that Instagram heightens depression and anxiety in young people. TikTok has been linked to depression and anxiety in middle-aged adults. A July 19, 2017 essay in The Atlantic about Twitter and anxiety still rings disturbingly true:
Twitter’s constant flow of new information and the fact that users tend to follow people who are more accomplished and successful than they are creates an especially potent cocktail of comparison for anxious people. "Twitter really inflames my professional anxiety," says Caitlin Cruz, a freelance journalist based in New York. "But it's also given me a lot of professional success." Cruz deleted the Twitter app from her phone a few weeks ago, which she says has made her life more bearable.
Yet here we are, adding platforms to our plates for fear of floundering if we were to opt out of just a single one. Meanwhile, the threat of going viral on Twitter constantly lurks, and with it the prospect of professional ruin.
Paying for Twitter also means supporting Musk himself. You don’t have to work that hard to find lists of many offensive and controversial things he’s done and said. There was the time he called the cave diver who helped rescue a young boys’ soccer team in Thailand a “pedo guy” (he apologized). He repeatedly downplayed the threat of the pandemic, and — against public health orders — opened his Tesla factory where 450 COVD-19 cases were then recorded. Musk has also said he disagreed with Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, though more recently he has said banned users wouldn’t be allowed back for “at least a few more weeks.” Over the weekend, he tweeted (and hours later, after it had gotten tens of thousands of retweets and likes, deleted) a homophobic conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi.
Unless Twitter’s algorithm changes fast, it’s not hard to imagine those who choose to pay — which is a choice I would understand, although I don’t currently plan to do it myself — being singled out for forking their cash over to Musk.
But perhaps even more unnerving is what could happen to social media more broadly if Musk is successful. Social media has remained free to users because platforms show us ads and sell our data. However, ad revenue is dwindling, notably at Meta, where it fell 4 percent year-over-year, according to its dismal third quarter earnings report. Will Meta, which owns Instagram, introduce a model where users have to pay for a blue check? Impressions that used to come easy now don’t transpire for many Facebook and Instagram accounts unless they pay for them anyway.
This is all happening at a time when a journalism career pays worse than ever (explaining why writers like me are on Substack, where our prospects for both earning money and doing meaningful work are much better than at many publications). Content has in so many sectors of the broader media ecosystem been so depressingly devalued that it’s unsurprising that creators themselves may face a near future of actually paying to post it with money in addition to our mental well-being.
I regularly have conversations with friends in media or the content business about the unrelenting pressure of social media. Now many of us are making videos, which requires a lot more time than throwing up photos or tweets. (I find both posting TikToks and being on TikTok to be more enjoyable than any other platform, because my videos get seen and I’m usually entertained when I’m idly scrolling.) Even if you’re not in the short-form video game just yet, posting is still a relentless, draining pursuit.
People ask if writing a book about Anna Wintour was scary. It was, but the truth is that publishing anything is scary. If Musk turns Twitter into a platform many of us feel like we can really leave, I suspect many content creators will go with enormous relief.
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Elon Musk's Twitter Signals New Horrors for Self-Promotion
I know I sound old and grouchy and out of touch too AND I'm catastrophizing. But when do the super-rich start charging us for oxygen? We can already see how successful they are at getting us accustomed to paying for water. I keep looking at the socioeconomic conditions that led to the French Revolution and checking YouTube for knitting lessons and guillotine assembly videos. I wanna be ready.
I can only speak for myself, but... I was completely addicted to Twitter (not as a poster, but as an observer and news junkie) and opened the app at least 5 to 10 times a day. A weird thing, happened, though: The day Musk took over, I quit cold turkey, and haven't looked back. Granted, it's only been a week, but just the thought of withholding something from that man -- even in the tiniest, smallest way -- seems to be enough to finally break my Twitter habit. Plus, it's sure to descend further into toxicity and chaos under his "leadership."