Jason Perlow
for Tech Broiler
| December 2, 2021
| Topic: Social Enterprise
Twitter has been through a lot in its 15-year history, and Jack Dorsey has played the role of CEO multiple times. This week, Dorsey announced his resignation, effective immediately. In his place is former CTO Parag Agrawal.
Hit the road @Jack #sayonara #hastalavista, #hello @Paraga
Dorsey had been under fire for a while regarding the dearth of innovation on the platform. There hasn’t been notable new product development, and many of the products and features that have been launched over the past five years were canceled or disposed of. The company has also been underperforming financially.
Dorsey has been a candle burning at both ends for far too long. He was the CEO of Square (now renamed Block, as of yesterday, focusing more on cryptocurrency and blockchain rather than credit card transactions) at the same time that he was the CEO of Twitter. He has been involved heavily in philanthropic activities while also being very active in cryptocurrency (hence, Block’s focus). Realistically, there was no way he could do this with his full capacity, giving shareholders and employees the time and attention they deserve.
Activist investor groups, such as Elliot Management, have been gunning to replace Dorsey for over a year. There have been concerns that he put more time into Square than Twitter. (Of course, at Square, they have been saying the opposite.)
Agarwal is more of an insider, having been CTO, so the big question is: Can he bring about the disruptive change that Twitter needs to evolve as a company?
Twitter stock fell when the company announced Dorsey’s replacement; thus, Wall Street has not been happy so far. But I wouldn’t pay too much attention to this early indicator — other technology companies have successfully promoted insiders to CEO, such as Microsoft with Satya Nadella. Nadella was very much a technologist. Arguably, he is the most successful CEO in the company’s history, transforming it into a cloud giant and revitalizing other aspects of its business.
So can Agarwal be Twitter’s Nadella? That remains to be seen. But we certainly need to give him that chance, and he has his work cut out for him.
Hashtag #misinformation #toxicity
While Twitter has gotten better about policing itself, misinformation is also still an issue on its platform and also, of course, on Facebook. In April of 2020, the internet content watchdog Newsguard identified a list of about 85 “Superspreader misinformation accounts” in the US and Europe on both platforms. These misinformation activities include spreading the following falsehoods:
COVID-19 does not existBill Gates announced that COVID-19 vaccines would result in 700,000 deaths
5G technology is linked to the spread of COVID-19
COVID-19 was predicted in a simulation
Vitamin C can prevent COVID-19
COVID-19 is a “biological weapon which was created in an American military laboratory”
Healthy people “suffer no harm” from COVID-19
COVID-19 vaccines have microchip tracking technology funded by Bill Gates
Of the 26 accounts that NewsGuard flagged to Twitter for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, 13 have had no action taken against them, and 10 of them have increased their follower number by 358,927 between them, a 23.7 percent increase on average.
Twitter “Spaces” is also new — a live audio chat service built into the official mobile client. Similar to Clubhouse, it allows up to 13 people to have a real-time audio conference, with up to thousands of people at a time as listeners. So far, there is no way to monetize these. There’s no master schedule of these chats for discovering them either — one simply says on your Twitter feed that you will host a talk at a particular time (which the creator can schedule in advance). When you start one, your followers see on their feeds they can join. It’s very ad-hoc at this point, so the discovery of these Spaces from a topicality or newsworthy standpoint, at least when compared to how Clubhouse does it, is not well implemented right now.
Ultimately, for Twitter to grow, it needs to get all of these features and services into its APIs and then allow third-party services and platforms to access them fully. That isn’t the case today; all of the API features aren’t fully implemented for public use. Additionally, most corporations and organizations that use Twitter do not necessarily use the official clients or the Twitter website; they use social media management platforms such as Hubspot and Hootsuite, which can consolidate many social media accounts and provide analytics and other features for integrated digital marketing campaigns.
All of these challenges — increased monetization capabilities for creators, launching new value-added services, making its APIs more accessible, and removing toxicity from its platform– are going to be significant hurdles to overcome for the company’s new CEO. Can Twitter grow out of its shell with Agarwal and become a trusted, foundational, backbone technology provider for the next-generation Internet? Talk Back and Let Me Know.
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