‎Decoder: How Donald Trump and Elon Musk Killed Twitter, with Marty Baron and Zoe Schiffer

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0:58Hi, everyone. It's Kara Swisher. Today, we're bringing you a special episode of Decoder, all about the demise of Twitter. Nilay Patel talks to Marty Barron, former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Zoe Schiffer, managing editor of Platformer and author of an upcoming book on Elon Musk and Twitter. Zoe is going to join us on Pivot next month, so consider this a little preview. Scott and I will be back on Friday with the latest headlines on business and tech. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

1:33Today, we're just going to talk about one very big problem. Twitter. 2023 will go down as the year that Elon Musk killed Twitter. First, he did it in a big way, by buying the company, firing most of the employees, and destabilizing the platform. Then he did it in a small but important symbolic way, by renaming the company X, and trying to make a full break with what had come before. So, now that the story of the company named Twitter is officially over, it felt important to stop and ask, what was Twitter anyway? And why were so many powerful people obsessed with it for so long? Here at The Verge, we don't often look back.

2:11We're a sight about the future after all. But sometimes it's important to stop, mark a moment, and consider why a technology or a tool made us all feel a certain way. And Twitter certainly demands that level of consideration. The important thing to know about Twitter is that its leadership never truly understood the platform, especially not at first. Twitter's users were where all of its best ideas came from, from hashtags to retweets. The users were the ones who made Twitter a home for both absurdist humor and major social movements. Twitter's users also turned it into the beating heart of the news industry, where news almost always broke first and fast, and where journalists and their blue check marks became part of a new social class that dominated the online conversation, for better and for worse.

2:56Fittingly, it was Twitter's users who ultimately killed it. The fundamental story of Twitter is defined by two of its most dedicated power users, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Both men were addicted to Twitter, defined Twitter, changed it, broke it, and then ultimately put it to rest. What's left now and what comes next is still an open question. To pull all this apart and make sense of it, I went and talked to two people with deep expertise in the media, Twitter, and how they interact. Marty Baron is the former executive editor of the Washington Post. He ran the paper during the Trump administration when two different challenges reached fever pitch.

3:35First was President Trump's usage of Twitter to wage an almost daily information war. And second, the battle between individual reporters building their brands on Twitter and the needs of the newspaper as an institution. He's got a new book about that experience called Collision of Power, Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post. We wanted to talk to Marty about his experience, his thoughts on Twitter during and after the Trump era, and why all of this ultimately contributed to him leaving the Post.

4:05So we have this idea that you can divide Twitter into several different before and after periods. and those before and after periods are defined by, in particular, two power users of the platform, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. There's a before Donald Trump on Twitter when reporters and politicians and athletes were all sort of talking to each other, but there appeared to be some norms governing how people would use the platform and what would happen there and how that would translate to what you might call real life. What was your view of Twitter in that before Trump period? Was Was it useful to you?

4:40Was it a utility? Do you see it as adding value to the newsroom? Well, it was. I mean, after Twitter was founded, we started to use Twitter. I was at the Boston Globe at the time as its top editor. And we saw it as an advantage for us, a way for the public to connect more directly with our reporters, to understand that they were human beings, that they had personalities. Reporters could use it to offer greater insights into stories. We also obviously used it as a way of disseminating our coverage to a wider population. And so it was considered to be quite useful at that point. But I think things did evolve.

5:15I think your analysis of this seems to be pretty spot on. I can't say that I thought of that myself. But I think that Trump did change the character of Twitter in a major way. Zoe Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer, a former Star Verge reporter, and the author of the upcoming book, Extremely Hardcore, Inside Elon Musk's Twitter. She's been chronicling the company in depth for the past year. Zoe and I talked about the company that Twitter was in the early 2010s, how it shifted under Trump, and how it ultimately found itself vulnerable enough to be snatched up by Elon. Twitter has gone through a number of periods, and I think there's a handful of moments you can point to as before and after moments.

5:57One of them is the candidacy and election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. What was Twitter like before that? It seems like it was very idealistic, that it had a sense of what role it would play in a news ecosystem, that it was a force for good, maybe even outside of the Silicon Valley sense of what it means to do good in the world, that it was actually a force for good. What was Twitter like before the Trump era? I think you hit the nail on the head with Twitter was a force for good. I mean, that's really how the company saw itself. It really stood in opposition to companies like Meta that were moving fast and breaking things.

6:33Twitter moved incredibly slow and felt like it could have a positive impact, not just on the world, but on the globe. And it had been through these widespread social movements where it had played a very crucial role. Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring were these examples of Twitter as a force for good. And when you walked into Twitter's offices during those eras, the front lobby coffee tables would have newspapers spread out, fanned out that had Twitter, Powers, Arab Spring headlines all over them. And it was a way that the company was able to recruit talent in Silicon Valley. It didn't pay as much as Meta, Amazon, on Netflix, but it was like, if you want to make money, make good money and do good, then this is the place to be.

7:23So it was shaky. It wasn't profitable. It was making some money. There was a moment when it felt like Twitter was a real competitor to Facebook and Facebook was really reactive to Twitter because of how seemingly important Twitter was to the news ecosystem. Was that reflected inside of Twitter that it was important in this way that it was playing a moment, not just in culture, but in politics? Yeah. I mean, you know, taken separately, each like individual tweet was kind of random and mundane, like perhaps not that interesting. But when you took them all together, the collective impact of those tweets was kind of this feeling that you had access to the like beating heart of the internet every day.

8:05Twitter really had deep penetration. The most important people in sports, media, and politics were talking there. And that was incredibly important. It really did pioneer this one-way social graph where it prioritized follows over friends. And that was a very unique thing that Facebook was not able to replicate. Did Twitter have a sense internally of why that was special? One of the things that really always jumps out to me is Twitter seemed to be run by people who didn't use the platform. And the users of Twitter seemed to drive the company more than its own executives. Did Twitter have any sense of why it was being used this way?

8:43No, it really felt like the founders were continually surprised with what Twitter was and what it would become. Like all of the features that we think of as core Twitter features, the hashtag, the retweet, the app symbol, all of those things were features that users basically created because they were going on and saying like, this is a cacophony of noise. There's no way to organize conversations, so we'll just organize ourselves. And in fact, when they pitched Twitter on adopting the hashtag as like an actual feature codified in the product, Twitter was like, no, that's very technical and complicated.

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10:38Journalists had become a core part of Twitter's user base in these years. Twitter wasn't just changing how news was distributed to the public, it was changing how the news was made. Journalists were building audiences on a platform, creating personal brands, and doing an awful lot of journalism on Twitter itself. The common view at the time was that Twitter was the beating heart of the news. It was the place to break big stories, cultivate sources, and endlessly debate headlines and other contentious topics. It felt like you had to be on Twitter if you were a journalist. It was where the news happened first and where it spread the fastest, especially amongst your peers in the media.

11:11That narrative became even more pervasive when Donald Trump, one of the site's loudest users, announced his presidential candidacy in 2015. Trump understood Twitter. He used it to launch and carry out his campaign, and later he ran his presidency on it. He also began to expose the cracks in Twitter. Under all that pressure, the company's indecisive management, lackluster moderation, and flat-footed product development began to buckle. And the image of Twitter as a force for good began to diminish. Trump fundamentally changed Twitter as a company, creating the conditions that would ultimately break it entirely.

11:44He also changed the relationship between the news media and Twitter by turning the platform and the U.S. presidency into one giant reality show, with Trump using his Twitter-powered megaphone to rile up his base, attack his critics, many of whom were in the media, and even announce policy. Sometimes he did all of that in a single tweet. Marty Baron was the executive editor of The Washington Post during the Trump administration, during which time Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the paper and feuded with Trump directly. I want to talk to you about how Trump used Twitter and then how reporters used Twitter or perhaps misused it.

12:22It's just woven into the journalism that was made during the Trump administration. Do you have the same view that Twitter was an animating force of the Trump administration? It was a way for him, of course, to speak to his followers, to speak to the country, really actually to speak to members of his own cabinet and other members of his government. He announced policies through Twitter before he actually told his staff that he wanted to pursue those policies. They learned what his intentions were from Twitter. It was tricky for us in the press, of course, because he didn't want to pay attention to everything he said, because not everything was worth paying attention to.

12:59But a lot was, and Twitter really was a window into his own mind. And a lot of what he said on Twitter actually ended up being official government policy. So it played a huge role, I think, in his administration. I think a very common criticism of the entire media industry, including The Verge, was that we would wake up every day, Trump would tweet something bananas, and then we would all react to it and treat it as though it was deadly serious. And then the next day we would do it again about something else completely bananas. Did you find any ways to build buffers against this or were you just sort of captured by it?

13:32I'm not sure we had a formal buffer, but I think that people learned to distinguish between what was for him just sort of blowing off steam or just, you know, waking up angry or going to sleep angry. He always seemed to be perpetually angry at something or other or someone or the other. So, you know, we had to distinguish what was really just normal Twitter activity on Trump's part versus what really signaled a significant policy position. He ran his government in a very chaotic way. And it was hard for us to deal with. that wasn't something that we were accustomed to. I think it was something that people were just trying to adjust to and not sure how to deal with that because we hadn't dealt with that before.

14:10News could be made at all hours of the day or night. You know, if you woke up in the middle of the night and started tweeting, somehow we needed to be aware of that and make an assessment of it. I don't think there's any science involved in any of this. It's totally subjective. But at some point, somebody will go back and look at this and maybe do some content analysis to see whether we made wise judgments or didn't make wise judgments. I, on the whole, think that we did. I'm sure there are instances where we paid too much attention to something and then it just never amounted to anything. The Trump years made Twitter famous for being an outrage machine in basically every direction.

14:47Trump rage-tweeted constantly. Everyone else rage-tweeted about Trump's rage-tweets. And when you have angry users spouting off at volume, you are going to have to do some serious content moderation. This placed Twitter in a very difficult position. In 2012, one Twitter executive infamously referred to the platform as the free speech wing of the free speech party. But there's a huge inherent tension in that. On the one hand, you have Twitter providing a voice to the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter. On the other hand, the President of the United States is using the platform to say horrible things about Muslims or to promote violence.

15:20That tension had to boil over eventually. There was no option for it not to. And Twitter's leadership did not seem up to the task or the scrutiny. What was your view of how Twitter was being run during this time? I think before it was being run very idealistically, and then during the Trump administration, it was stressed. How did you think the company was being run during that period of stress? My sense is they were struggling with how to deal with Trump in the same way that we in the press were struggling with how to deal with Trump and how the public overall was struggling to process Trump.

15:47I mean, look, he was a candidate unlike any we'd ever seen before. He was a president unlike any we'd ever seen before. he was breaking all the norms. We had no precedent to look at in terms of how to deal with somebody like that, and neither did Twitter, which was actually, of course, a much younger institution founded in the mid-2000s, right? And they were just sort of winging it in the same way that I think a lot of people were winging it. So they would make a lot of mistakes. They would overreach or they would underreach. At the Washington Post, we tried to focus on those things that were actually significant as opposed to those things that weren't significant.

16:21A lot of readers said we were paying too much attention to his comments on Twitter. And then if he said something outrageous and we didn't cover it, other readers would say, well, why didn't you cover this? This was so outrageous. And it wasn't just readers. I think a lot of journalists were reacting in many ways to Trump through their activities on Twitter. And they became certainly more opinionated, more reactive to Trump, more outraged. Of course, we had a media environment that provoked outrage, that fed off outrage, where really polarization is pretty much the business model for a lot of media.

16:56People were responsive to that. And I think they sort of fell into that environment really in the same way that, you know, guys in a locker room would start using, you know, locker room language just because everybody else is. And so, yeah, I think Trump did have a significant effect on the way that reporters, other journalists use Twitter. This is a turn, right? This is like a really big turn where you have a younger generation of journalists that has come up online using the platforms, is communicating fully with audiences in ways native to the platforms, and that is at odds with the institution and how the institution wants to be viewed.

17:33Has that gotten better over time? Was that amplified by Trump? Was it amplified by the nature of Twitter at that time? Or is that a purely generational conflict? Well, I think it's partially generational. People grew up with social media. They were accustomed to doing that, accustomed to expressing themselves in a certain way, to sort of sharing their opinions. I also think people grew up sort of wanting to establish their own sort of brands or identities or images on social media in a way that my generation of journalists did not. I also think it was heavily influenced by Trump's presence in the White House.

18:08He was engaged in an assault on so many of the values that we hold dear, including myself, You know, a free press, free expression, democracy, civil discourse, tolerance for all people, respect for the facts, you name it. It seemed like he was engaged in assault on so many of the values that are central to, I think, quality journalism. And so I understand where that was coming from. And I understand why people felt, you know, aggrieved by all of that. I just don't think that it was helpful to us in terms of if I were to define the purpose of journalism, it's to give the public the information it needs and deserves to know in order to govern themselves.

18:48Twitter didn't really have any mechanisms in place to try and curb Trump's behavior or repair the platform's culture. In turn, the discourse started to spiral. Twitter became a decidedly grim place to be, especially when it became clear inside the company that the company's leadership had no desire to take action on Trump's account. Jack Dorsey was very resistant to limiting Trump's reach in any meaningful way. He did not want to ban the nominee. If, you know, there was action that needed to be taken on one of Trump's tweets, he always pushed people to take like the minimum action first. And you can debate whether that's positive or negative.

19:27But the moment that Trump was elected, there was a loud call internally for the company to ban Trump, to stop treating him basically like a regular user. There was this feeling that, look, we're applying the same rules to him that we are to everyone else, but he is not like everyone else. We need rules specifically for public figures. We need to take these threats seriously. We need to regulate incitements to violence, not just like literal threats on the platform. I had a conversation with a very high-ranking executive at the time who said, we became a simulacrum of the platform. We weren't listening to each other.

20:06We were fighting all of the time. We were blaming each other. The same polarization that was playing out on Twitter was playing out inside Twitter, too. Nobody quite knew exactly what you were supposed to do in an environment like that. That was fertile ground for somebody like Trump who could take advantage of the chaos that he himself was creating. And I think Twitter was just struggling with, like, what is our role in an environment like this? How do we respond to a president like this in the same way that many of us in the media were saying, well, how do we cover somebody like this? What is exactly the right way to do that?

20:39There was no history of this kind of president in this kind of media environment, in this kind of social media environment. That tension fully boiled over when COVID hit. Everyone wanted to sort out fact from fiction, to learn what officials were saying, and to hear what the evidence said. Everyone in the country, in the world, needed trusted information. And instead, what we got was Twitter. In the heart of the pandemic, Twitter became a cacophony of people arguing, of venture capitalists becoming armchair epidemiologists with no credentials whatsoever, of hate mobs forming against scientists.

21:13The Trump administration was so unprepared for the pandemic that it became essentially unhelpful. People sat cooped up in their homes, trying to figure out what was going on. The platform was not ready for that moment, for that shotgun blast of noise. Twitter itself seemed paralyzed. It definitely was a turning point. I would tie in QAnon and like anti-vax specifically with that and then say the combination of all of those things were a turning point. The company was utterly unprepared for the pandemic in the same way that we all were, except that the consequences were obviously a lot greater.

21:49But I mean, the mechanism that Twitter has to fact check news are basically what are credible news sources saying and what are like official communications saying. And when those are kind of part of the misinformation sphere, like it's hard even going to those sites to figure out what is true and what's not in a situation where the facts are changing all the time. Like the company was just totally unprepared to keep up with the pace of news and the pace of misinformation. — COVID is when the post as an institution or the news as an institution ran into the buzzsaw of social media and Twitter, maybe most directly, right?

22:27There's too much information and everyone's just going to trust whoever they trust instead of having any institutions that anyone trusts. Do you think that that can be put back together? That feels like when we talk about the end of trust in institutions, I can point to that as a breaking point, and I actually don't know how to put the puzzle back together. I'm not sure it can be put back together, frankly, without some sort of cataclysmic event. I think we're in an environment now where people can find any information or so-called information that reaffirms their pre-existing point of view and tells them that what they're thinking is exactly right, whether it is right or not right.

23:01That happens to be the world that we live in. I think that does feed distrust. It's not that all institutions are right all the time. I mean, we should be skeptical, of course. We just can't be cynical and we can't be dismissive. We live in a time where so much is being dismissed and devalued. All of the things that have been sort of central to our progress as a people, as societies, modern society. You know, we've dismissed education, we've dismissed expertise, we've dismissed experience, and we're dismissing evidence. And when you do that, we run the risk of making some gigantic mistakes that are going to hurt us.