Episode 549: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitter?

How monotonous the sounds of the forest would be if the music came only from the top 10 birds. We give all the birds a chance WREK, Atlanta.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk last week completed the $44 billion deal to take control of Twitter, and meanwhile, a lot of his customers are still trying to take control of their Teslas. After completing the purchase of Twitter on Thursday, Elon Musk sent a tweet directed at the social media company's advertisers and said the platform quote "obviously cannot become a free for all hellscape." No, but it could stay that.

(SINGING) I know it must have been a some big setup.

You are listening to WREK, Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Fred Rascoe and Marlee Givens. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a hellscape. No, sorry, a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it. MARLEE GIVENS: Today's episode is called How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitter?

And so we thought, since we give all the birds a chance, we might spend a little time on the question of Twitter. Perhaps the problem of Twitter.

I like how you got a pun in there, dude.

Is it a virtual public square? Is it part of the conversation of civilization that libraries support? Is it a hellscape of its users own making?

Well, I made that joke earlier because hellscape seems a little extreme.

Enough said, that's Twitter.

Well, our songs today are about birds-- birds as in tweet tweet Twitter tweet telling people what you think and the dreaded reply. Twitter has changed how people seek and exchange information, but for a lot of us, we're left behind rooted in the ground while the Twitter bird goes flying high. So let's start with a song about seeing something meaningful get beyond our reach. This is "High Flying Bird" by Judy Henske right here on Lost in the Stacks

(SINGING) There's a high--

That's "High Flying Bird" by Judy Henske right here on Lost in the Stacks. Today's show is called How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitter. And for fun at home, you can try and make that match the song "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria." The answer to the question, how do you solve a problem like Twitter is, of course, with care and time and a judicious application of a cohesive public policy informed by free market principles and information science.

What?

No one seems to be interested in doing that, though.

So let's talk about what's going on right now. I have a party trick. Fred, will you please ask me, what is Twitter?

Hey, Charlie-- hey, Charlie? CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, yes, Fred. What is Twitter?

It's a microblogging platform that began as a side project and slowly became a feed-based massive communications platform.

Oh, that's fascinating. Does it now? CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, doesn't that sound like nothing that it is. Right.

Marlee, what do you think Twitter is?

In my mind, I still think of it that way. I still think of it as, hey, this is what I'm having for lunch today, or this is what I saw when I was walking down the street. But obviously, no, it has become an information source. It's become a communication platform. It's become a way to, in a sense, communicate with large groups of anonymous people and also directly with a single person.

Yeah, and the real magic of Twitter is the-- I think, I cannot verify this, but I think that it was the lead of the switch from a sort of site-based social media to a feed-based social media. In the sense that you get an account on Twitter, and then you can tweet things, publish things out into the larger feed, and then people decide-- we'll get to that --people decide which parts of the feed they want to see as opposed to, I'm going to go to this person's profile and read all their stuff.

Before 2000 what, six or seven or so, whenever it was, the way to do this was to create a blog page.

Yeah

To tell people what you had for breakfast.

A Myspace or something. And it's nice that you mentioned the year because I have a Twitter cheat sheet right here. You all ready?

OK.

Here's a very short history of Twitter. It's founded in 2006. Oprah talked about it on her show with Ashton Kutcher in 2009. The Arab Spring brought Twitter into the political consciousness in 2011 when it was clear that was the method of communication that a lot of revolutionaries were using. It hit 200 million users in 2012. It then went public as a company in 2013.

I know that we played that joke at the very beginning where it was Seth Meyers, I think, at the beginning where he said, like, Elon Musk bought it, and it became a hellscape. And Seth Meyers asserted like, no, it's going to stay a hellscape.

It can keep being that, yeah.

I'm aligned with that.

Who has a Twitter account? Fred, do you have a Twitter account?

I have one. I have not logged in or posted in like five or six years.

Wow.

I do access Twitter sometimes without logging in to just, like, professionally, there's a few-- Lisa Janicke Hinchcliffe, she's been on the show. Sometimes I'll log in and see if she's posted something that's of use to me professionally, but as a non-logged in user you scroll down about 10 tweets and it says, hey, would you like to log in. And I said, no, I wouldn't. And I go on from there.

And Marlee, do you have a Twitter account?

I do. I do.

Do you use it?

I do. I don't have a great following, and I don't follow a lot of the-- I know that you have-- among your cheat sheets --you have a list of the top accounts. And I don't think I follow any of them.

Yeah, do you want to hear those real quick?

Yeah.

OK, here are the most followed Twitter accounts in 2022. This has probably a change since then. Barack Obama.

Nope.

Justin Bieber.

Nope.

Katy Perry.

Nope.

Rihanna.

Nope.

An account, Cristiano, that I don't understand. Taylor Swift 13.

Nope.

Lady Gaga, Elon Musk, Narendra Modi. I don't know who that person is. So I don't know what the--

Is that the Prime Minister of India?

Oh, God, I'm a terrible person. And The Ellen Show.

Cristiano might be the football player.

Might be, yeah.

There's, I think, (TOGETHER) Cristiano Ronaldo is--

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

I don't know.

I just blanked out. It was all white light and static. What were you saying?

I don't know, though.

And then Ellen DeGeneres' show account, The Ellen Show. Those are the top 10 followers in 2022 based on millions of followers. Barack Obama had 131 million. The Ellen Show had 77 million.

And the great thing about Twitter is, I don't need to follow any of those people because--

It gets pushed into your feed.

It does. It does.

It gets pushed in and people that I actually do follow will retweet some of those. And so I don't-- yeah, I don't have to stay hyper aware.

It's like a substitute for news reporting, oftentimes because a journalist can just say, hey, this person tweeted something. And I present it to you in my news feed.

Yeah.

So why are some librarians sitting around-- why did three librarians talk about Twitter, right? That's a joke. So very quickly before we have to end the segment, I just want to lay the groundwork for the next two. Twitter, once it became a political emblem, the revolutionaries used it to free themselves of tyranny.

And librarians, being interested in information and access to information and how it's inherently political, that makes this--

Yeah, and, yeah, and the free speech issues that we're dealing with in the library community these days too, yeah. This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more about Twitter after a music set.

And file this set under QL45,C18

[TOOTS AND THE MAYTALS, "THREE LITTLE BIRDS"] Yeah, yeah, don't worry where we put the dogs on.

That is "Three Little Birds" by Toots and the Maytals. Before that, "Mockingbird" by Ines and Charlie Fox. Those are songs about messages delivered by birds.

This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show asks the question, how do you solve a problem like Twitter? Charlie, we talked about Elon Musk's take over. And he declared-- somewhat stridently as a free speech absolutist, I guess, can you hear my eyes rolling? He declared that Twitter was the de facto public square. Is it? Marlee, what do you think? Is Twitter the de facto public square?

Well, in a sense, you can say yes, but I think the universe of Twitter users, it's still a very small percentage of the actual population.

Ooh, I've got some numbers.

You do. CHARLIE BENNETT: If I can find them. OK.

Isn't it like 84 million people in the US are on Twitter, something like that?

My papers are scattered.

Out of a population of what, 400 some million?

Yeah.

I think it's something-- so most people--

OK, 401 million users in 2022.

Worldwide, not in the US. CHARLIE BENNETT: Worldwide, yeah. And that's not even scratching the-- are we up to 8 billion people on Earth? Almost. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, I think you make an excellent point, Marlee. And it's been recorded many times. Twitter is very vocal. It is not a great sample size for the United States--

Exactly.

--as a whole.

Yeah, yeah, it's a big squeaky wheel. Back in the '90s, I had a friend who said, they say in space, no one can hear you scream. But on the internet, everyone can hear you scream.

CHARLIE BENNETT: All right, well, that's both horrifying and very true. And within the Twitterverse, certain people are screaming and certain people are just kind of sitting back and watching the show go by. And you can choose to participate or not. But yeah, but that's the thing, like in the actual town square, it's the person with the loudest voice who attracts the attention.

Yeah, the public square is where people are supposed to try out ideas.

Yeah.

Hear other people's ideas, and, oh, Fred, Fred just made a face.

But does it work like that? I mean, does--

The literal public square or Twitter?

Both because they both kind of work the same way. If you already know what you believe in, you go to the public square and you align yourself with those reinforcements. Whoever's standing on the soapbox. You're not there--

Hold on. Let us be serious.

You're not there to find a differing idea that you might align yourself with.

No, I hear you, but there's no-- when we say public square, can you imagine a place that you would go and then find the people who are listening to the person who agrees with you? There isn't one now, is there?

No, that's what I'm saying. I think we're agreeing.

Yeah, yeah, but previously, back in the old days, Fred, back when things were simpler and shorter and smaller and slower, right?

And soapboxes were actually boxes that soap came in.

And people used tobacco. They would go to spots and just hang. I imagine this wonderful time in the world when hanging out was a really important activity.

Do you think you are imagining that? Because even 100 years ago, 150 years ago, you go to the public square. People that go to the public square, are they really there for that marketplace of ideas? I wonder if a view differing from mine will convince me today?

Probably not, probably not, but I can't really-- I can't speak to the metaphor anymore than I can what I've been given by people. They say the public square was once where ideas that were community-based but global in perspective were exchanged amongst, again, let's be honest, property-owning men--

Right, white privilege.

--who could stand up and shout. But the idea that there needs to be some kind of discourse, some kind of open discourse of ideas, that's very important to us as librarians. The collections that we maintain and grow are essentially the ideas that people have had that initiate more conversation, that initiate more ideas. We hope that people will hear/read everything. There's no public square, but there does need to be a public conversation. I call it the conversation of civilization.

Mm-hmm, but that conversation does take place within a strict framework. We don't accept just anyone's idea in the library. If someone self-publishes their own pamphlet, we're not readily going to--

Yeah, there's not a hole in the wall where you just throw your stuff into the library.

We're not bound by an absolutist policy to include it in our collection.

[LAUGHS] Although some people think we should be.

Frankly, we are providing materials that someone else has selected. That some part of the commercial enterprise has said, this is the idea that we want to sell. And librarians subscribe to certain published reviews. We make our collection policy based on what our vendors will provide us. There's all kinds of filters that are going into that. That's very different from Twitter.

Yeah, one of the prime examples of a public square that I read about when I was preparing for this show is Times Square. Times Square was built to be a public square. Now, I don't know if any of you are familiar with what Times Square was like in the '70s.

Fun.

Fun is a good way to say it. It's a very pleasant way to say it. Never has there been a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, would also be a way to say it.

Times Square became a very difficult place to navigate, sort of an only the strong will survive. Because it was a public square, and because there were spaces where people could rest for a moment and try and sell, maybe, their ideas, oftentimes, they're bodies or drugs. So it does seem like Twitter might be a public square more than we think. It is where all kinds of things that are unpleasant or hard to grapple with arrive because it's wide open.

It is wide open. And unlike a physical public square, you can find your people so much more quickly.

Yeah.

And which is you can find out who you're aligned with. You can find out who you think you're better than, people who are bad actors in your opinion. For me, so this is just personal why I don't really like engaging on Twitter other than to just check some professional news every now and then, I used to actually log in, followed a bunch of people, and spent a good amount of time every day just like reading. I would never post, usually, but I would like check everyone's feeds.

I'm not a dummy, but I'm nobody's definition of a genius. But the bubble that I found myself in like, oh, man, yeah, this is-- I realize that I've got it, and I could also readily identify, oh, this is people that are--

You're declaring in-group and out-group dynamics to--

I think so without being asked to articulate it that well.

Yes, I think. And that is just like that's not a healthy thing, well, not for me.

I think it's healthier than my experience of Twitter, which was always that it would be like walking into a room that was filled with screaming people and being like, I guess I have to scream too. I would be dragged into it. I only get on Twitter now, once every five, six months when I've been drinking, and I'm listening to music. And I post, hey, everybody, I'm drinking, and here's the music I'm listening to. That's about it.

Do you get some engagement on that? CHARLIE BENNETT: Not anymore, no, not since Elon Musk bought the place.

No, and I go to listen but not to speak.

Yeah

Yeah, I mean, for a while, I was following comedians. I mean, like there's got to be some comedic take on whatever's happening in the world. And then I found that I'm discovering voices that I probably never would have really discovered like Black Twitter, gay Twitter. These are groups that I don't belong to, but Twitter lets me kind of sit on the side and listen to those conversations.

Yeah.

That's really interesting. CHARLIE BENNETT: And we should say that those are sort of self-identified communities of users. Marlee is just not throwing that off, like, the hashtag #BlackTwitter, the hashtag #GayTwitter, the hashtag #LibraryTwitter. Is sort of a connecting method for people to bring in tweets of folks they're not following at the moment.

That kind of gets back to like how my unhealthy perception of Twitter and how it made me feel mentally unhealthy. Because those identities, those groups, Black Twitter, Gay Twitter, lots of different ones, they are obviously made up of individuals. It's not a monolith, but it's presented as a monolith. And people refer to it as if it is a monolith, and so it can really feel mentally like you have the weight of an entire population behind you, against you, whatever the situation is.

Wow, you are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we'll talk more about the internet, free speech, public discourse, monoliths, and other topics on the left side of the hour.

This is the King of town. I have no business being on the radio, but you're lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. It's my big break.

Today's show is called How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitter? I want to read to you from an article in New York Magazine titled This Was Always the Problem With twitter by John Herman, published December 14th, 2022. "That the big social media platforms privatized and centralized a bunch of the world's communication is a widely recognized problem. The sort of broad assessment on which a EU regulator and a right-wing venture capitalist might, at least superficially, agree.

That was "Everybody's Talking" the Fred Neil classic as interpreted by the great Bill Withers. Before that, "Talking Loud" and "Saying Nothing," the James Brown classic as interpreted by Living Color. CHARLIE BENNETT: What a unified set. Those are songs about telling people what you think, even if you don't know what you're talking about. Now, in the script, they're supposed to be a little music bit that plays right here, but I forgot to load that into automation. So let's just roll in--

As the bumper, I'll just say, Fred, I feel personally attacked.

This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show asked the question, how do you solve a problem like Twitter? CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] I know. Charlie?

What a stupid title of a show. I don't know why I thought we should even get into this.

And how can librarians solve it, my goodness.

Yeah.

What were you going to say, Marlee?

Well, I mean, what is the problem?

Yeah, right, what's your problem? What's my problem? What's Twitter's problem. I feel like we did diagnose a couple of things. Some broad, if not problems, then questions that we want to engage with and that we hope others will engage with coming from a library science or information management kind of viewpoint.

Oh, man, should I even bring up that the Library of Congress at one point, tried to archive Twitter for a few years.

You should totally bring that up. And you should make a statement about it.

I think-- I can't remember when they finally shut it down. I think it was 2018.

Long enough ago that we don't remember.

Right, but they saved all of Twitter for a few years up until like 2018, 2019 something like that. I apologize. I just remembered it, so I don't have the number at hand.

You know what it made me think of?

Yeah?

It made me think of someone who prints out their emails and files them.

Yeah, and as far as we know, they still have that swath of years just sitting on a server somewhere. Still no access to them. Still no way to interact with that collection. But I think it's still there on Library of Congress servers.

So you can check out how 2014 went if you want on Twitter.

But you can't. someone who--

One day, you will, yeah.

Yeah, someday maybe.

Maybe.

So that's a problem, right? And another problem that we kind of identified or sort of sloped our way toward-- we slouched toward like a rough beast, was that content moderation and the vetting of language, authority, relevance all that kind of stuff, that happens at a slow speed when you have a publishing infrastructure, when you have time to actually look and see, well, who wrote this book and how did it get to us, and who published it.

I think that Twitter, as a reflection of the public discourse, unfortunately, just it's not going to be solved. If it is a problem like we're talking about, is not going to be solved until our culture improves a little. It's a reflection of the culture. And right now, there's a lot of folks who have problems with voices of people of color, voices of LGBTQ folks. And that's going to be reflected in Twitter, especially if it's a free speech absolutist hellscape.

Yeah, there's the discussion of-- so there's an old quote about how the only solution for bad speech is more speech, or the way to protect from bad ideas is better ideas. That kind of thing. But better speech does not include threats of violence. Better speech does not include sort of eradication metaphors.

Yeah, well done all of us.

Right on. Yeah, let's real quick, let's do a round robin here. Marlee, can you think of a way to solve a problem like Twitter?

The only thing that comes to mind, is get out of there if you don't like it.

The individual solution.

It works.

Stay in there if you do like it. CHARLIE BENNETT: That's good, very good. MARLEE GIVENS: I've found my place that I'm comfortable with, but that's solving the problem for me, and not for everyone else. What about you, Fred?

Yeah, I looked at it as solving the problem for me-- getting out of solving the problem for me. I'm sure a lot of folks do get something out of it by being together with it-- being engaged with it. Solving the problem is like saying, let's solve American culture.

Mm.

Charlie?

Oh, you know my solution to everything, right?

Let's burn it down.

Burn it down.

Burn it down. CHARLIE BENNETT: Burn it all down. This is Lost in the Stacks. It's time for some music. Just burn it down.

And we can file this set under HM742.D46.

Is that burn it down, Fred?

I think. Is that a reply to what I just said?

That was "Talk Back" by Sugar Plastic, and before that, "Time of No Reply" by Nick Drake. Songs about replying or not replying, which is usually the better option.

Today's show is called How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitter? And what problem is that?

Aha, the question of the day. Social media plays an outsized role in public discourse. CHARLIE BENNETT: Private companies are replacing public institutions. Free speech is a legal concept wrapped in a public perception distributed by celebrity culture.

Late capitalism.

The internet.

It's too much. It's a hellscape. Roll the credits.

MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK, Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rasco, and Marlee Givens.

Legal counsel and a soapbox where we can shout about it were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.

Special Thanks to Twitter. What?

Yeah.

All right, well, it's written here. So I'll read it. Special Thanks to Twitter, Elon Musk-- no, OK, no. [LAUGHS] Draw the line there.

Oh, Fred's invoking his free speech rights.

And the Constitution-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Going off script. --of the United States for supplying us with today's show. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. CHARLIE BENNETT: You know, normally we would tell you where to find us online and what to do on there, but this is one of those shows where we should probably just say, we're going to ignore the internet for a little bit.

On the next Lost in the Stacks, more free speech.

Oh, no.

This time in school libraries.

That's not going to be any kind of fun, is it?

No.

Mm-hmm.

Well, we'll talk about that next week, but now, it's time for our last song today. I think the more I know about the advantages that have been brought about by our online society, the more I want to be offline. Our old co-host, Ahmit was anti-internet if you recall. And I think I'm just about ready to join him. Anyway, let's close with a song about the dream of being disconnected. This is "Offline" by Oxford Drama right here on Lost in the Stacks.