So this video feels pretty deeply naive. I like Adam Conover, but this kind of sucks.
There was and always will be an inherent tension to social media. What made Twitter valuable to its users - whether that's (the feeling of) speaking truth to power, engaging in whatever weird trends defined the culture, or promoting your wares as what is essentially a small business - has zero overlap with what made Twitter valuable to the people running and funding it: namely, the ability to extract so much information from its users which the owners could sell to online advertisers. There is simply no way the Twitters and Facebooks of the world would have come into existence without that facet of their business model. Hence, a publicly funded Twitter faces two options: either it preserves this aspect of the business model, which, why, or it gets rid of it and finds some other way to fund hosting and maintaining the site. As far as privately owned platforms go, the trend appears to be subscription services, and I have my thoughts on that. However, I imagine the publicly owned version would just use a subscription fee to supplement government funding, if it chooses to have a subscription fee at all.
But all this is really dancing around the much larger question facing Twitter: is the site worth preserving at all? What about it warrants keeping it around not just as a historical artifact, but as a service people actively use? The social good it serves? Best case scenario, that serves as a vent for the frustrations our increasingly undemocratic culture breeds in all of us: we might not be able to enact meaningful social change ourselves or through our elected representatives, but at least we can yell at and dunk on the powers that be in the hopes that they grow as frustrated as we are and acquiesce. And if that comment is any indication, the culture is hardly worth preserving either. Twitter isn't just defined by context collapse and incredible degrees of toxicity; it actively encourages them to habituate users into using the site more often. Admittedly, much of that comes down to a lack of decent moderation, or an inability to set a site-wide set of norms dictating what is and isn't appropriate behavior - but I don't see much public ownership of the site could do to change that.
Collectively speaking, our lives will begin to improve only once we no longer treat something like Twitter as a necessity within it.
