X: Elon Musk and Social Media Death
X: Elon Musk and Social Media Death
Edited by Nadia Dupuis
Edited by Nadia Dupuis
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On the list of 2023’s most memorable events, the notorious Twitter rebrand by our favorite, Elon Musk, has to be high on the list. July saw the death of the blue Twitter bird, the onslaught of thousands of meaningless blue verification checks, and the national outrage of loyal Twitter fans. Despite Musk’s grandiose (and perhaps, unrealistic) goal of turning X into a platform that can “do everything,” the rebrand has done nothing more for the app than destroy its credibility and deplete its user base. While we mourn the loss of Twitter, we might take this opportunity to look back at every other social media app that has died, and which ones might be spared the transience of the internet’s attention.
From MySpace to Vine to Facebook, social media apps have been passed in and out of popular awareness for decades. How can an app like Vine, so popular, and so seemingly timeless from our present-day perspective, be pushed to the point of shutting down by competing video apps like Instagram? And how can Facebook, which replaced the equally-as-adored MySpace in the late 2000s (which replaced its predecessor, Friendster), now be relegated by most to “mom media” and “the place where we post our prom dresses”?
Social media app creators must grapple with the constant and often conflicting demands of both their users and the people who fund them, investors and advertisers. As apps attempt to constantly evolve, they seem to constantly converge, copying the most profitable features of their competitors. From Twitter (or X) stories, to YouTube Shorts, to Snapchat Spotlight, social media apps are beginning to all look the same, and lose that which made them unique and likeable in the first place, attempting to reconcile investors’ desire for constant growth with users’ desire to simply keep the app they like.
New social media apps spread through the internet world like an infection, a metaphor utilized in 2014 by a Princeton study on the rise and fall of Online Social Networks (OSNs). Your friends download it, so you download it, and, within months, millions of people around the world have been converted to loyal users. One look at the recent rise of BeReal shows just how quickly a new app can grow—an “infection” that looks remarkably similar to the spread of COVID-19.
Just as quickly, social media users abandon an app when everyone else seems to be doing so, a phenomenon made evident by the relative abandonment of apps like VSCO and YikYak. Abandonment, or “recovery,” as Princeton called it, is just as infectious, and in some equations that I didn’t quite understand, Princeton showed that “immunization” against infectious recovery is, by their model, impossible.
“The implication is that there is no way to “immunize” the infected population compartment against infectious recovery in the irSIR model. In the context of the irSIR model, all OSNs are expected to eventually decline.”
(Canarella and Spechler, 2014)
So, what about Twitter? Has Elon Musk truly killed it with the rebrand to X, or will he succeed in his hope of creating an “everything app”? That remains to be seen. All that he has done so far, it seems, is rebuild Twitter in his image: corrupt, money-hungry, and terrified of becoming irrelevant (sorry, Elon). Since October 2022, when Musk acquired the company, X has lost 13% of its active daily users, clearing the stage for Instagram Threads’ attempted takeover. By destroying the credibility of verified users, giving platforms to conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis, and monetizing anything he can, Musk has destroyed Twitter as it once was. But, who knows? Maybe that was his plan all along. Maybe all social media apps are ultimately doomed for disaster, and X has simply passed its time.
Works Cited
Bell, Karissa. “How Twitter died in 2023 and why X may not be far behind.” Engadget, 20 December 2023, https://www.engadget.com/how-twitter-died-in-2023-and-why-x-may-not-be-far-behind-143033036.html. Accessed 21 January 2024.
Brozyna, Emily. “What Happened to Myspace?” PureWow, 24 August 2022, https://www.purewow.com/entertainment/what-happened-to-myspace. Accessed 21 January 2024.
Cannarella, John, and Joshua Spechler. “Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics.” arXiv, 2014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf. Accessed 21 January 2024. Preprint.
Davis, Wes. “Twitter is being rebranded as X.” The Verge, 23 July 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/23/23804629/twitters-rebrand-to-x-may-actually-be-happening-soon. Accessed 21 January 2024.
Ivanova, Irina. “Twitter is now X. Here's what that means.” CBS News, 31 July 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-rebrand-x-name-change-elon-musk-what-it-means/. Accessed 21 January 2024.
Kantrowitz, Alex. “The Elon Effect.” Slate, 23 October 2023, https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/twitter-users-decline-apptopia-elon-musk-x-rebrand.html. Accessed 21 January 2024.
Mathieu, Edouard, et al. (2020) - "Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus' [Online Resource]
Perez, Sarah. “BeReal pushes back at report that it’s losing steam, says it now has 25M daily users.” TechCrunch, 29 September 2023, https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/29/bereal-pushes-back-at-report-that-its-losing-steam-says-it-now-has-25m-daily-users/. Accessed 21 January 2024.
“VSCO.” Google Trends, 9 November 2017, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=VSCO&hl=en. Accessed 21 January 2024.
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