Instagram is 3 times larger, and Facebook almost 6 times larger in active users. It is basically the same size as Pinterest and only a bit larger than Quora, which I bet most of you have never heard of. In terms of the US market Twitter still ranks fairly low among the major social media platforms in terms of the number of people who use it. About 20% of Americans say they ever use Twitter, but likely the number of people who actually visit regularly is infinitesimally smaller.

So why all the fuss? Sure, it is fun to see the world’s richest man fight with the world’s most powerful governments and media outlets, but does it really matter for the average person?

Yes, it actually does matter. A lot.

It is not the number of people who are on Twitter that makes it so influential. It is who they are and how they use it. Pew Research looked into Twitter use and found that 80% of all Tweets come from 10% of the users. And those users are extremely influential. They are the movers and shakers in our society. Politicians, media figures, writers, journalists…if you matter, you will matter a lot on Twitter. And Twitter is where all those people come together to build The Narrative™ as I like to call it.

I, and every writer I know, is on Twitter constantly. It is where the news gets out first. It is where the influential react to what is going on, shape what it means, and coordinate their messaging. That is why you can find series of tweets from high profile figures who suddenly start saying exactly the same thing. It is the coordinating tool used by the glitterati to tell the rest of us what they want us to think about the world.

It’s not just me who says this. People in the Elite know this and use it.

Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic–not a conservative talking points magazine–wrote about this phenomenon the other day in a fascinating newsletter. It is worth considering, especially if you don’t quite get why we all keep chattering on about Twitter happenings.

Over the last year, I’ve written frequently in these pages about social media in general, and Twitter in particular. This focus might seem strange, given that most people do not use Twitter and likely never will. Does the site and whoever happens to own it actually matter? What would change if it disappeared tomorrow? These are reasonable questions. So today, I want to explain how Twitter influences your life and the information you consume, even if you’ve never used it.

Back in June 2021, I was interviewed by the journalist Graham Vyse for a smart new publication called The Signal. The topic: how Twitter forges consensus among the journalists, commentators, politicians, and other decision makers who govern our society—and how that consensus often turns out to be wrong.

Now that consensus is not always, or even often formed inorganically. Sure, lots of emails and memos with talking points go out to the major influencers. But there generally aren’t secret phone calls or directives from the top. But the biggest influencers send out their tweets and the message is picked up and amplified by the smaller fish until it becomes The Narrative. There is no need any more for directives from the top, although a signal from the most influential often serves that purpose. In a moment I will go into precisely why that is. Even people who want to be intellectual honest get pressured into compliance in order to survive.

We talked about how Twitter profoundly shapes what elites believe and do, determines whose stories get told, and affects which voices get heard. We discussed how the site’s groupthink influenced everything from COVID-19 coverage to the reflexive dismissal of both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidential prospects. And we tackled the ways in which Twitter undermines trust in journalists and journalism. In short, we unpacked how this relatively small social-media site affects the rest of us, regardless of whether we’ve ever logged on to it.

Twitter’s importance has to do with facilitating the interactions between the Elite, who are spread all over the world these days. The very top of the Elite is transnational–a bureaucrat or politician in the EU has much more in common with an American bureaucrat or politician than with his own citizens. And in general their loyalties lie with their class, not their nation. Largely because their day-to-day interactions are more within their class than with their countrymen.

Here’s a bit of Rosenberg’s interview with Vyse. It took place last year but is relevant to today, perhaps even more so:

Yair Rosenberg: As many have pointed out, Twitter enables people who previously couldn’t be heard to be heard. Someone like me, writing for a Jewish publication [as I was at the time], has vastly wider readership as a result of Twitter. I criticize Twitter and what it does to journalism, but my career wouldn’t be the same without it, and that’s true for a lot of people from marginalized communities. They’re able to show they know what they’re talking about and have real contributions to make to the public conversation. They don’t have to go through all of the gatekeeping. That’s part of what the optimistic narrative of the internet was always about.

What we’ve seen over the past four years or so, coinciding with the Trump administration, is a greater recognition of social media’s negative effects. I often see Twitter, not creating problems but intensifying preexisting human tendencies. It’s not that Twitter created the tendency to forge a false consensus based on social pressures among elites, for example. It’s just that Twitter made it a lot easier to do it, enforce it, and raise the cost for dissenting from the popular consensus on a given issue.

You can see two important and interrelated threads coming together: if you become even modestly influential or recognized on Twitter the rewards can be substantial. We live in an attention economy–that is why a YouTube influencer can become a millionaire. (One guy I watched on YouTube did a channel on solar energy; he went from living in a van homeless to living in a huge Las Vegas estate in a year). If you are a reporter or writer you are competing in a very tight marketplace. Eyeballs have lots of places to go, and you need those eyeballs to get paid.

So Twitter can make or break you.

At the same time, Twitter makes it very easy to enforce social compliance. You can get destroyed easily if you deviate too far from approved opinion. A few dissenters can make a living off of fighting against the Elite consensus, but that is not an easy path to follow. It is much easier to go along and not risk being destroyed.

Once one has invested a lot in developing your Twitter presence, the capital is both real–it has significant value–and evanescent–it can disappear in a moment should the crowd decide to “cancel” you. Getting cancelled on Twitter has huge real-world consequence. Your economic prospects are tied to respectability on Twitter, and your social circle is almost as evanescent as your reputation. Everything is tied to what the Twitter hive mind decides.

So best not rock the boat.

Wired featured a sober story about the potential downfall of Twitter and what it would mean to its most avid users–creatives. It was thoughtful and basically honest about why the loss of Twitter would be a disaster for the “creative class.”

[I]f we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts. 

It’s easy to calculate Twitter’s economic value as a company: That’s underpinned by reported ad revenue, $4.51 billion last year (and plummeting fast). But there’s a far, far vaster realm beyond that, what an economist might call the secondary value of Twitter. That encompasses the cash people make out of connections or prestige they develop on Twitter, but also the intangible wealth now vested in its communities and in the sense it offers to people of having a place in the world. That human currency cannot just be ported over, unchanged, to Mastodon. There are whole nations whose political discourse occurs mainly on Twitter. The amount of reputational and social wealth that stands to be lost if Twitter collapses is astounding. Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world’s biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured. 

Status bank is a great way to put it. A very important source of capital and indeed wealth is stored in Twitter accounts: social status among the Elite. Being at the top gets you a lot–news media personalities can make over $10 million/year, and these days becoming a Twitter personality can get you in the running for that kind of job. And while the rewards go down, being on cable news as a commentator is a very nice gig with lots of perks.

Again, the author Eve Fairbanks reveals how Twitter shapes the Narrative without even trying.

So first, a reckoning with Twitter’s evil. Twitter exponentially intensified the existing inequality in elites’ reach. In my field, I was told—and came to feel—that I had to target my work toward the biggest Twitter accounts. A retweet from someone with millions of followers appeared to be the only thing that separated a piece of work that made no difference to the world and one that made a huge difference. Last year, a top editor at Insider delivered a memo to his writers alerting them that their performance would be judged by “impact points,” which would be determined in part by how much “huge” Twitter commentators interacted with them. This became the attitude of a whole range of publications’ executives—particularly lefty ones, whom research has shown rely substantially more on Twitter than conservatives do. “Huge” Twitter users were those with nearly a million followers or more, a minute subsection of journalists. Tens of thousands of American aspiring writers were publishing and tweeting in no small part to juice the interest of a tiny set of elite opinion makers. 

These Twitter super-users became the unacknowledged class that determined which events and ideas were considered important in America, and especially in lefty America. That might seem just to mirror the authority once held by top editors at The New York Times. But the differences are that, once seated, these arbiters could basically never be unseated. Someone can’t get fired from the Twitter elite or even substantially demoted; even if they get suspended, when they come back all their followers automatically reappear. It’s not an accident that the general discourse feels more static than it used to. It’s partly because of Twitter.

As you can see, anybody who is not at the top of the heap is utterly at the mercy of those who are. Even their ability to pay the rent or buy their food without becoming a dishwasher or cashier can depend upon the approval of those at the top. And those at the top are generally Leftists who can shape The Narrative.

This why cancel culture works, and how it works. You cannot seriously challenge or displease the people at the top of the pyramid because in a very real sense they own your future. If you are a writer, opinion maker, “creative” in any way (economically speaking), these people own you. They may not even be aware of your existence, but like a vengeful god they can destroy you with their displeasure. Even if you are a tenured professor, their reach is that significant. Twitter influencers are among the most powerful people in the Elite world.

Over time, Twitter influence came to be a prime way to land gigs or money offline. Jon Katz, a freelance writer, estimates that “most” of his income is now generated with Twitter’s help. Editors ask him to turn threads into stories, and when he published a book, he says, “a lot of the people who invited me on TV to talk about it I knew from Twitter.” Those interviews drove sales. He got scoops because sources trusted his blue check. In times when Katz has lacked the backing of an institution, he says, “the one thing that I could point to was my Twitter account, where I had a lot of followers.”

Even a lot of what are supposed to be new, fresh, non-mainstream opportunities for journalists now merely replicate or hinge on their Twitter success. Take Substack: According to a WIRED analysis, the authors of the top 50 paid news and politics Substacks who listed their Twitter profiles had 387,046 followers on average when they launched their newsletters. Substack’s CEOs have said they decide who to recruit to the platform according to a method that analyzes writers’ Twitter presences and assigns them between one and four fire emojis. Four fire emojis can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance money to participate in Substack Pro.

All of my favorite Substack writers I found on or through Twitter. I probably spend $100 or more on monthly subscriptions to Substack blogs at $5 a month, and all of those writers have tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers each. Add up the monthly take for each and these authors are making millions–each month. That’s a nice jump from a job that paid low six figures a year. A very nice jump.

Most of those figures I follow on Substack gained their notoriety by dissenting from the Elite consensus–but each of them did so after they had built a large Twitter following. If they were not already near the top of the ecosystem they would have fallen by the wayside forgotten. And, ironically, their notoriety was built upon being attacked by the big guys as traitors to their class.

Even the dissenters’ futures were determined by that Elite™.

In short, even if you have never once opened a Twitter app, most of what you see, read, and hear has been argued about and shaped by the consensus built on Twitter. It is where the status economy exists, and where the high status impose their will upon the rest of the plebs who are trying to make a living.

Your news was first disseminated on Twitter; its meaning shaped by Twitter; and its reach is shaped by Twitter. Because Twitter is where the status economy rules.

That is why the Elite™ has been freaking out about Elon Musk’s ownership. He is neither a member of their class nor particularly sympathetic to it. Yet the Elite™ cannot simply quit Twitter–many have tried, few have succeeded. Their status exists more within than without Twitter, and the Twitter mob is the enforcement mechanism the Elite use to wield power.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. The richest man in the world vs the most influential people in the world. Who wins? And what will it mean to the rest of us?

Obviously you can guess who I am rooting for. But can you guess who I am betting on?